Upcoming Programs

The goal of rezoning East Midtown – the 78-block district that stretches from East 39th to East 57th Street, from Third to Madison Avenues – was, in the words of the New York Times when it was passed in 2017, “to revitalize what was once the core of corporate activity in New York City.” Now, nine years later, we’ll revisit that history and assess the impact of East Midtown Rezoning.

First proposed by the Bloomberg administration in 2012 and ultimately adopted by the City Planning Commission and the City Council in August 2017, East Midtown Rezoning was a public policy measure designed to tip the shifting scales back from the government-subsidized competition of the new, Class A towers of Hudson Yards and Ground Zero toward the transit-rich, but aging office district anchored by Grand Central and Park Avenue – the original Terminal City.

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.

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.

The Business Core tour of the Museum’s three thematic walking tours of Battery Park City on Thursday, July 16 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.

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.

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.

Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners

This in-person program in the gallery will also be streamed online.

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.”

This final program in the Museum’s series Park Avenue: Past, Present, Future will bring together key members of the Park Avenue team to discuss their process and plans. Panelists to be announced.

To register for this FREE program, click on the link above to RSVP. You will be redirected to Ticketstripe to reserve your seat. Members receive priority registration by emailing [email protected] with the names of all guests.