Upcoming Programs

The South Neighborhood tour on Saturday, June 13 (RESCHEDULED from June 11) at 4pm explores Battery Park City’s southern district, which is home to The Skyscraper Museum and includes some of BPC’s earliest landscapes and infrastructure, as well as the residential enclaves built in the 1990s that followed the 1979 Cooper Eckstut Master Plan. Starting in the Museum’s gallery to see historic views of the waterfront, the tour will visit Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, newly opened after its redesign as part of the South Battery Park City Resiliency project, as well as South Cove and the green spaces that connect to the Esplanade, the first waterfront park in New York since the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade in 1951.

This tour will meet at The Skyscraper Museum, 39 Battery Pl.

After Carol Willis gives a short history of the introduction of International Style office buildings on postwar Park Avenue, Managing Partner of MdeAS Architects, Dan Shannon, will explain the major issues postwar glass boxes have faced and how their owners seek to update their aging curtain walls, lobbies, and mechanical systems to compete in the current market. Over the past 35 years, MdeAS has rejuvenated a large portfolio of postwar buildings on the Park Avenue corridor, including 90 Park Avenue for Vornado Realty Trust; 100 Park Avenue for SL Green; 200 Park Avenue for Tishman Speyer and Irvine Company; 237 Park Avenue for RXR; and 430 Park Avenue for Macklowe Properties. He will discuss the economic influence on the tower as a typology, as well as how some emerging modernists held to traditional elements while others became fully modern.

The Museum’s director, Carol Willis, will offer a gallery tour of The Invention of Park Avenue, which examines how the creation of Grand Central and an avenue out of thin air, was the catalytic connection of rail and real estate that gave Park Avenue its extraordinary, evolving New York identity. Curator’s tours are FREE, but you must book a timed ticket at 3pm on Ticketstripe, through the RSVP button.

The South Neighborhood tour on Friday, June 19 at 4pm explores Battery Park City’s southern district, which is home to The Skyscraper Museum and includes some of BPC’s earliest landscapes and infrastructure, as well as the residential enclaves built in the 1990s that followed the 1979 Cooper Eckstut Master Plan. Starting in the Museum’s gallery to see historic views of the waterfront, the tour will visit Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, newly opened after its redesign as part of the South Battery Park City Resiliency project, as well as South Cove and the green spaces that connect to the Esplanade, the first waterfront park in New York since the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade in 1951.

This tour will meet at The Skyscraper Museum, 39 Battery Pl.

There are three great streets in Manhattan: Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 42nd Street. Carol Herselle Krinsky will speak about the last of these, highlighting stories featured in her new, free, online book, Building 42nd Street: A Chronicle. Her in-person talk will take us from colonial times to the present, touching on nineteenth-century structures such as the Egyptian Revival reservoir and Crystal Palace, early versions of Grand Central, modest and lavish hotels, and commercial buildings from skyscrapers to bonbon shops. Among the vast urban array of 42nd Street, Professor Krinsky will illustrate are tenements, theaters, transportation facilities, lobster palaces and cafeterias, automats, a peep show, lost churches, and a private club. Of course she’ll include the greatest public library in the Americas.

As the U.S. marks its 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, we will walk historic Wall Street with a consciousness of its colonial past, recap its role as the banking center of capitalism, and observe its recent rise as a reinvented residential neighborhood. Skyscraper Museum director Carol WIllis will lead a 90-minute walking tour that meets in front of Federal Hall, at the juncture of Wall, Broad, and Nassau streets, and weaves its way through the Financial District, highlighting both the current uses of the landmark buildings that line Wall Street and discussing the generations of structures that occupied those sites and the cast of characters that populated this historic district.

The goal of the rezoning of East Midtown – the 78-block district that stretched from East 39th to East 57th Street, from Third to Madison Avenues – was, in the words of the New York Times when it was passed in 2017, “to revitalize what was once the core of corporate activity in New York City.” Now, nine years later, we’ll revisit that history and assess the impact of East Midtown Rezoning.

As the U.S. marks its 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, we will walk historic Wall Street with a consciousness of its colonial past, recap its role as the banking center of capitalism, and observe its recent rise as a reinvented residential neighborhood. Skyscraper Museum director Carol WIllis will lead a 90-minute walking tour that meets in front of Federal Hall, at the juncture of Wall, Broad, and Nassau streets, and weaves its way through the Financial District, highlighting both the current uses of the landmark buildings that line Wall Street and discussing the generations of structures that occupied those sites and the cast of characters that populated this historic district.

The Business Core tour of the Museum’s three thematic walking tours of Battery Park City on Thursday, July 16 at 4pm will focus on the commercial core with its 1980s skyscrapers of the original World Financial Center (now Brookfield Place) by architect Cesar Pelli, as well as the expansive North Cove Marina and its public realm. This walk will investigate how the planning concept of public-private partnership was both the principle and economic engine of the Battery Park City project and how the goals of opening the waterfront to public access and recreation was realized over three decades.

This tour will meet in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place.

The Business Core tour of the Museum’s three thematic walking tours of Battery Park City on Friday, July 24 at 4pm will focus on the commercial core with its 1980s skyscrapers of the original World Financial Center (now Brookfield Place) by architect Cesar Pelli, as well as the expansive North Cove Marina and its public realm. This walk will investigate how the planning concept of public-private partnership was both the principle and economic engine of the Battery Park City project and how the goals of opening the waterfront to public access and recreation was realized over three decades.

This tour will meet in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place.