NEW YORK CITY — More than any other American city, visitors come to Manhattan for the museums — the Met, the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney. Families often head straight for the dinosaur bones at the American Museum of Natural History, or a solemn history lesson at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
New York City itself, of course, is one giant tourist attraction. During a 24-hour dash into Midtown Manhattan early this year, the city offered its usual bounty of surprises: a string quartet dignifying a temporary plywood walkway along Fifth Avenue, the blare of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” at the Rink at Rockefeller Center, an adorable group of preschool kids in puffy jackets and safety vests romping around a meadow in Central Park.
For those who love the city and those who want to know it better, one worthy destination that has to jostle for attention in this chaotic metropolis is the Museum of the City of New York. Located on the Upper East Side along “Museum Mile” (which also features the Museum for African Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, and more), MCNY tells the living history of the city that never sleeps.
With the museum commemorating its 100th year, it’s a great time to go. Through July 21, “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” fills the top floor of the block-long, Georgian-style building with artifacts and interactive exhibits that celebrate the vitality of the crowd, the pleasures and challenges of urban living, and the countless citywide gathering spaces where strangers converge.
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The centerpiece, “You Are Here,” is a dedicated, low-lit theater with 16 movie screens wrapped around three walls, on which a choreographed montage of cinematic images of New York teem, dance, and dodge taxicabs. Representing more than 400 films, from “Queens Logic” to “Harlem Nights,” the continuously running 20-minute program was produced by the same creative team responsible for the Oscar-winning 2021 documentary “Summer of Soul,” about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.
“You Are Here” has been such a hit with visitors — one newspaper recently called it the best movie to see in New York — that the museum has decided to keep it on as a long-term installation.
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At the other end of the third floor, visitors are invited to step on projected images of the five boroughs, each of which triggers a sound system playing songs identified with various corners of the city. “You can get with this, or you can get with that,” rap the Queens duo Black Sheep. A few of the songs contain fleeting swear words: “This is New York,” reads an aptly unruffled disclaimer. “S*** happens.”
For its first decade or so, the Museum of the City of New York resided in Gracie Mansion, which later became the city’s mayoral residence. The purpose-built red brick building facing Central Park opened to the public in the mid-1930s. A vision of the Scottish-born author Henry Collins Brown, the new museum followed in the then-recent tradition of Europe’s great “city museums” — Paris’s Musee Carnavalet, Frankfurt’s Historisches Museum — according to chief curator Sarah Henry.
In the early 20th century, Henry explained, “New York was busy establishing its bona fides as a city worthy of comparison to the great European capitals.” Brown, in tandem with the historian May King Van Rensselaer — a prominent member of the New-York Historical Society who had grown disillusioned with the institution — imagined a city museum that would not just collect the city’s antiquarian legacy. It would also speak to the city’s diverse, ever-evolving population and “tell the story of the contemporary city, its past, present, and future,” Henry explained.
Through early December, the museum is showcasing the vibrant, multi-disciplinary art of Manny Vega — prints, paintings, mosaics, and murals by a Bronx-born dynamo whose public work is familiar across East Harlem. His intricate style has been called “Byzantine Hip-Hop.”
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“Frankly, I think I enjoy this more than something like the Met,” said Cynthia Ferguson, who was touring the museum with a dozen friends from her retirement community on the Hudson River. She grew up in Washington Heights, she said, and remembers coming to the museum as a child.
The museum attracts many international visitors who are accustomed to making a city museum an early stop on their itinerary, Henry said. That group accounts for roughly 30 percent of the museum’s attendance. A similar percentage of visitors come from across the United States, whether it’s their first or 15th visit to the Empire City.
But the remaining 40 percent of the museum’s guests are New Yorkers, or “New Yorkers at heart,” Henry said — people who were born in or once lived in the city, or have family roots here. No matter how much of New York you’ve experienced, as Cynthia Ferguson could attest, there’s always something you haven’t seen before.
James Sullivan can be reached at [email protected].