Upcoming Programs

Carol Willis, museum director and curator of the exhibition The Invention of Park Avenue, will launch the series with an online lecture TRA(I)NSFORMATION. The talk will illustrate how the New York Central Railroad transformed its right of way into Manhattan via Fourth Avenue into a spectacularly successful infrastructure project that linked rail and real estate, not only as a revenue stream, but as what became an engine of urban development.

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.

Architectural historians and authors Andrew S. Dolkart and Anne Walker will join forces in this program on the architectural firms Warren & Wetmore and Schultze & Weaver. To an astonishing degree, the designers of these two firms, closely related in practice and projects, dominated the commissions in the Grand Central district’s – often called Terminal City – first phase of development from c.1906 to 1931. They designed the better part of buildings erected above the railyard from 42nd to 50th Street, largely hotels and swank apartments. Stately on the exterior and opulent within, the collective effect of their architecture was to create a high-rise lifestyle for High Society.

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.

Violin duo Miolina returns to The Skyscraper Museum for a concert that complement’s the Museum’s current exhibition The Invention of Park Avenue. Mioi Takeda & Lynn Bechtold will perform a mix of classical favorites and newer contemporary gems. Just as Park Avenue has evolved over generations, the music in this concert highlights how creative ideas are built, adapted, and reimagined.

Miolina will perform works by the following composers: Leonard Bernstein, Valerie Coleman, Dorothee Eberhardt, George Gershwin, Fritz Kreisler, Angélica Negrón, Florence Price, and Guy Wood.

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 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.