Founded in 1923 to document the city's history, the museum holds the Stettheimer dollhouse, whose miniature gallery contains an original work by Marcel Duchamp.
It's smaller and generally far less crowded than the major Fifth Avenue art museums, making it a good stop for visitors who want NYC history without long lines.
The museum spent its first years inside Gracie Mansion, which proved too small almost immediately. Joseph H. Freedlander's neo-Georgian building of red brick and marble trim went up between 1929 and 1930 at the northern end of Museum Mile, was dedicated on January 11, 1932, and was designated a New York City landmark in 1967. The address matters to how the visit reads: this is the top of the Fifth Avenue museum run, opposite Central Park and a long block from the crowds at the Met.
The permanent exhibition New York at Its Core opened on November 18, 2016 and is the clearest single account of the city on offer anywhere. It runs through three galleries — Port City, covering 1609 to 1898, from the Lenape and Henry Hudson to the consolidation of the five boroughs; World City, 1898 to 2012; and the Future City Lab, which hands the argument to the visitor through interactive design tools. Four themes hold it together: money, density, diversity and creativity. It is a history told as a set of pressures rather than a parade of mayors.
The Stettheimer Dollhouse is the museum's oddest holding and its best. Carrie Walter Stettheimer built it between 1916 and 1935 — two stories, twelve rooms, about fifty inches long. Its miniature art gallery is hung with tiny originals made for it by the family's artist friends, including Marcel Duchamp, who produced a small version of Nude Descending a Staircase, alongside Alexander Archipenko, George Bellows, Gaston Lachaise and Marguerite Zorach. Her sister Ettie gave it to the museum in 1945, finishing two unbuilt rooms herself.
The wider collection runs past 1.5 million items, and the photography is its deepest seam — Jacob Riis and Berenice Abbott among them — along with holdings on Broadway's theater history and a substantial costume collection.
1220 5th Ave, New York, NY 10029 · Official site ↗
The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) is a history and art museum in Manhattan, New York City. It was founded by Henry Collins Brown in 1923 to preserve and present the history of New York City and its people. It is located at 1220–1227 Fifth Avenue between East 103rd to 104th Streets, across from Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, at the northern end of the Museum Mile section of Fifth Avenue.
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