Upcoming Programs

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.

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.

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 In an unpublished three-volume album that he titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower,” Hine assembled more than three hundred photographs, numerous newspaper clippings,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.