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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.