Upcoming Programs

The Museum’s director, Carol Willis, will offer a gallery tour of The Modern Concrete Skyscraper, which examines the hidden history of concrete in tall buildings. This exhibition reveals why, today, almost all skyscrapers are built of concrete, not steel. Curator’s tours are FREE, but you must book a timed ticket at 3pm on Ticketstripe, through the RSVP button.

In his new book Designing the American Century, Thomas J. Campanella argues that Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano were the foremost spatial designers at work in the mid-20th century. Their vast portfolio of public landscapes propelled the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux into the motor age, touching the lives of millions and changing the face of the nation. With the patronage of public-works titan Robert Moses, Clarke and Rapuano transformed New York over a span of fifty years.

The North Neighborhood tour of the Museum’s three thematic walking tours of Battery Park City, on Friday, July 25 at 4pm, will cover the north residential neighborhood, which was developed in several phases, beginning with Stuyvesant High School at the northeast edge and the esplanade and Rockefeller Park along the Hudson. A diagonal avenue lined with apartment buildings creates one face of the neighborhood, while the inner courts of the large blocks are connected by the delightful Teardrop Park. Located two blocks from ground zero, we will also explore the history and design of the Irish Hunger Memorial completed in 2001.

This tour will meet in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place.

The Museum’s director, Carol Willis, will offer a gallery tour of The Modern Concrete Skyscraper, which examines the hidden history of concrete in tall buildings. This exhibition reveals why, today, almost all skyscrapers are built of concrete, not steel. Curator’s tours are FREE, but you must book a timed ticket at 3pm on Ticketstripe, through the RSVP button.

The South Neighborhood tour on Thursday, August 7 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 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.

Tireless chronicler of Manhattan’s building history, John Tauranac finds a new angle on the city’s past in his new book New York’s Scoundrels, Scalawags, and Scrappers. Beginning each chapter with a different building of the era, he delves into the social history on site. As he recounts, the 1890s, the tail end of the Gilded Age, was both a time of great inequality and, also, opportunity for those who did not play by the rules. These included “the managements of some businesses and some administrations of the municipality who… gamed the system to their advantage. They are New York’s scoundrels, scalawags, and scrappers.”

The South Neighborhood tour on Friday, August 15 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 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.

In his new book, Queens: A History of the Most Diverse Place on Earth, prolific author Lawrence R. Samuel charts the historical development of the New York City borough from the 1920s to today. Samuel’s narrative traces the evolution of Queens from a quasi-suburb of Manhattan for the white middle class into, today, the most diverse multiethnic, multiracial, and multireligious county in the United States. From the leafy enclaves of Forest Hills Gardens and Sunnyside to the transformations of Flushing Meadows, Samuel focuses on the residential development that has become home to more than 2.4 million New Yorkers. As he argues, following the trajectory of Queens adds much to our understanding of the city, the country, and the world.

In her new book Albert Kahn Inc.: Architecture, Labor, and Industry, 1905–1961, Claire Zimmerman charts a history of second-wave industrialization associated with the growth and development of the United States auto industry and its global footprint. Her case study of the architecture firm most closely associated with the major auto companies in Detroit explores how industrial capitalism fueled campuses of the auto industry and helped catalyze the militarization of industry.

As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Americans live in deteriorating public housing projects, enduring the mistakes of past housing policy. In his new book The Projects, Howard A. Husock explains how we got here, detailing the tragic rise and fall of public housing and the pitfalls of other subsidy programs. He takes us inside a progressive movement led by a group of New York City philanthropists, politicians, and business magnates who first championed public housing as a solution to urban blight.