Upcoming Programs

In his new book, Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia, Joshua B. Freeman explains how a form of multifamily housing with idealistic roots became a ubiquitous model dwelling, promoted by both public entities and private developers. Freeman rescues garden apartments—typically low-rise, multifamily residences that enclose or are surrounded by landscaped gardens—from their invisibility in the American landscape and details their outsized influence on housing and social policy as they helped upgrade living standards for working people.

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.

Throughout 1905, an amateur photographer dedicated himself to capturing Broadway, from the bottom of Manhattan to the top. In sun, rain, and snow, at dawn and late at night, C. G. Hine photographed buildings that were threatened by rapid development: outmoded stores, hotels, and theaters, workshops, and shanties. His survey also foregrounded the precarity of the street’s denizens, such as sex workers and pushcart vendors, as well as its animal, arboreal, and botanical populations. In an unpublished three-volume album that he titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower,” Hine assembled more than three hundred photographs, numerous newspaper clippings, and a typed essay. In 1917, he donated the album to the New-York Historical Society, which is where the historian Nick Yablon rediscovered it.

The famous publicity photograph “Lunch on a Beam,” also known as “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” pictures eleven ironworkers – mid-air on an I-beam bench – during the construction of Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building in 1932. Despite the image’s renown, little factual information or serious history has been available about it. Now, in a new book, Lunch on a Beam (April 2026), Christine Roussel – long-time archivist at Rockefeller Center and author of the definitive books The Art of Rockefeller Center and The Guide to the Art of Rockefeller Center – unpacks the story behind one of America’s most iconic photographs.

The South Neighborhood tour on Thursday, 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.

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.