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 Fire and Clay: How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago, Will Quam, Chicago’s foremost brick aficionado, chronicles the construction and transformations of the Windy City’s neighborhoods and skyline. In the first book of its kind, Quam traces origins of the local industry from the earliest manufacture of common bricks through the peak of production in the late 1920s, when Chicago produced over a billion local bricks a year and imported nearly another billion face bricks for fancy facades. His talk will also feature the role of brick and terra cotta ornament embraced by Chicago architects and builders from the 1890s through Art Deco skyscrapers and beyond, in postwar towers.

Henry C. Millman, author of the new book Ornamental Cornices: Manhattan’s Sheet-Metal Masterpieces, continues the Museum’s fall focus on brilliant uses of building materials in the urban environment. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the facades of many residential and commercial buildings in America’s cities were crowned with sheet-metal cornices that blossomed into elaborate and impressive expressions of architectural eclecticism. Of all the cities where these cornices were installed, New York holds the greatest number and variety–particularly in such Manhattan neighborhoods as Chinatown, the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Harlem.