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| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 75 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned |
 The curators integrated visual depictions of track and field world records into the exhibition. Bars mark heights of high jumps, lines on the floor show long jumps and shot puts and such. It’s one thing to read a record, a much more viscerally impressive thing to see one in the flesh. |
This is my second hall of fame (after the Hall of Fame for Great Americans), and the second museum in one of New York’s antique armory buildings (after the Park Avenue Armory). However, it is my first museum devoted to a sport. New York doesn’t have, say, a museum to baseball or football. Or soccer.
There are sports legends waxified at Madame Tussaud’s. The Jackie Robinson Museum hopefully exists in New York’s future. And the Met has its baseball card collection, which I suspect it keeps mainly to show it’s even more encyclopedic than the Louvre. But in general sports are an underserved museum topic in New York City.
The National Track and Field Hall of Fame resides in the 1909 22nd Core of Engineers Armory in Harlem. The entire building is now a track-and-field complex, with a running track in the vast former drill hall. Like most of New York’s armories the architecture is cool and castle-like.
work. Abandoned as a school due to a fire in the pyromaniacal 1970s, the Clemente Soto Vélez Center was founded in 1993. It operates a number of endeavors in the building, including four theaters, artist studios, rehearsal spaces, two art galleries, and the aforementioned Escape the Room game.
Thinking about “future New York Museums” could inspire a ruminative, speculative essay on how the museum business will evolve over the next decade. I certainly have some thoughts about that, given my intense museum-going over the past year.
When I first compiled my list of New York museums, one of my sources was the 
Tucked into Rockefeller Center, the Fire Department maintains a small kid-oriented presence called the FDNY Fire Zone. The Fire Zone consists of a modest-sized space with all sorts of fire equipment lining one wall, an old fire truck (at least, the cab of it and a slice of the back part), huge numbers of patches, given or traded from fire departments the world over, and a gift shop about the same size as the exhibit space.
However, if you have kids roughly 4-8 years old, the story differs dramatically. In that case the Fire Zone merits 4 Met buttons for visitability. For anyone with young kids interested in firefighters or fire trucks (and what young kid isn’t?), this place will seem ultra-cool, with a whole truck to play in and around. It’s a rare free, indoor play space. While it is somewhat commercial (there’s that gift shop after all), it’s not nearly as commercial as say the other kid-friendly indoor spots near Rockefeller Center, the Nintendo or Lego stores.
