Upcoming Programs

New Yorkers today are eyewitnesses to the third phase of Park Avenue’s historic evolution as a value corridor and luxury brand. Almost vanished are the first era of buildings of the original “Terminal City” erected on the New York Central’s “air rights” zone above the railyard. The second growth of modern office buildings of the postwar decades are now beginning to yield to new ambitions and market forces. The Department of City Planning’s 2017 rezoning of East Midtown has also made possible a new scale of construction.

Dr. Joseph Colaco returns to the Museum with a lecture that builds on his 2024 talk in our Modern Concrete Skyscraper series on the “tube-in-tube” structure of the 1971 masterpiece, One Shell Plaza in Houston by SOM architect Bruce Graham and engineer Fazlur Khan. In this second lecture Colaco will trace the development of the steel-and-concrete composite building system and will discuss the design and construction of the 1000-foot tall Texas Commerce Plaza (now JPMorgan Chase Tower) in Houston, which when completed in 1982 was the tallest composite building in the world. The tower utilizes an open-tube composite perimeter frame combined with a central concrete shear wall.

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.

The nominal “park” of the Park Avenue median from 46th Street to 57th Street has stretched and shrunk over the past century. Created out of thin air from 1903 to 1913 during the electrification and double decking of the New York Central’s railyard, underground, Park Avenue is both a bridge and a tunnel. Above “ground,” it is one of the world’s greatest urban boulevards.

Now, the century-old infrastructure of road and bridge is the focus of a lengthy rehabilitation effort by the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) Metro-North Railroad, which is responsible for the maintenance and reconstruction of the Grand Central Terminal Train Shed. Over the coming years, as the roof is repaired in phases, Park Avenue’s medians will be widened and the public space redesigned. Working with the landscape architects of Starr Whitehouse, NYC DOT is engaged in the final stages of “putting the ‘park’ back in Park Avenue.”

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.