New York’s best off-beat museums

While other museums might take you through the history of NYC via historic documents, photographs and priceless artifacts, City Reliquary chooses a far more eclectic approach to presenting insight on the greatest city in the world. The permanent collection includes all sorts of quirky ephemera like old postcards, a vintage subway turnstile and glasses that once held seltzer water. 

There’s no shortage of tall, impressive skyscrapers in Gotham: the Flatiron Building, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Woolworth Building, Rockefeller Center and One World Observatory are just a few of the massive structures recognizable the world over. At this Battery Park museum exhibit, explore the design, technology, real investments and construction techniques that make these towering beauties possible in our vertical metropolis. 

On Surf Avenue, the main drag of New York’s most famous beach, you’ll find this colorful museum dedicated to America’s playground: Coney Island. Here, the Brooklyn neighborhood’s past is celebrated with fun house mirrors, vintage bumper cars, a collection of coolers and thermoses from the ’50s and ’60s and examples of particularly unique postcards. Check out a 3-D printed scaled model of the original Luna Park (1903–1944) and other special exhibits.

Mathematics are made fun at this NoMad venue, which features cool interactive installations that allow you to explore the prinicples behind geometry, algorithms, optics and physics. There’s even a corrugated track that lets kids ride a square-wheeled tryke as smoothly as a conventional one. 

A National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark, this relatively modest brick house in Queens was home to the jazz legend from 1943 until his death in 1971. It houses Louis Armstrong’s personal collection of 1,600 recordings, Armstrong memorabilia donated by his legion of fans, and the furnishing left in the house after the death of Armstrong’s wife Lucille in 1983—who, as the home’s official interior decorator, was partial to opulent wallpaper and robin's-egg-blue kitchen cabinets. 

This perfectly preserved late Federal-Greek Revival house, complete with its original furniture, takes visitors back to elegant world of New York’s 19th-century upper-middle class. Though it’s a museum now, the house was occupied for nearly a century between 1835 and 1933 by the family of hardware purveyor Seabury Tredwell and his descendants. Find it in Lower Manhattan.

For those who consider a visit to a New York restaurant a major cultural experience full of discovery and wonder, America’s first museum dedicated to eating, dining, cooking and food culture is for you. Exhibits at MoFAD in Brooklyn rotate seasonally, plus there are special talks and tastings that take place at MoFAD after hours. 

A Boerum Hill institution since 1986, Micro Museum has held steadfast at its Smith Street address even as the neighborhood has been radically transformed by the influx of hipsters and Wall Street types. The brainchild of interdisciplinary artists Kathleen and William Laziza, the museum celebrates “American ingenuity, invention and artful innovation” with a wacky assortment of interactive video displays, computer games, audio tricks, special effects and musical props. 

Located aboard a refurbished 1914 Lehigh Valley Railroad barge, The Waterfront Museum in Brooklyn is dedicated to preserving New York’s maritime history, with classes, performances, photos and vintage objects that harken back to the city’s nautical heyday as the most important port in the country. 

The Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Bronx has assembled a marvelous trove of Jewish antiquities from before the Holocaust, along with a modern art collection with pieces by Alex Katz, Ben Shahn and Andy Warhol. 

A self-described “modern natural history museum devoted to the curation and exhibition of contemporary artifacts that illustrate the complexities of the modern world” Tribeca’s Mmuseumm’s exhibition program has included such oddball presentations as “Toothpaste Tubes from Around the World,” “Hand Modified Russian Watches” and “Personal Possessions found in the Pacific” (which strangely includes a Georgia driver’s license). Less of museum than a tongue-in-cheek send-up of one, Mmuseumm offers a little something for the connoisseur of the weird in us all. Note: It's open seasonally.

This museum serves as a love letter to the enigmatic street artist known only as Banksy. The Lower Manhattan venue features the largest collection of Banksy’s life-sized murals and artwork in the world. Many of the re-creations at the museum no longer exist on the street. Expect to see more than 160 works on display in this celebration of the artist. 

A collection of vintage train cars spanning the 20th century is the main attraction in this ultimate shrine for train buffs, or anyone else interested in the transit system that is the lifeblood of New York City. Housed since 1976 in a former IND subway in Downtown Brooklyn, the museum displays historic artifacts dating from the opening of the subway in 1904 and its expansion through all five boroughs to today. 

Ice cream is at the center of this 20,000-square-foot museum that’ll make the cold treat even more fun (who knew it’d even be possible?). Across 13 multi-sensory installations, visitors to the museum will be able to interact with fun elements like a three-story indoor slide, and the all-pink Celestial Subway. Even better: The sweet treats along the way. Yes, we’re talking about unlimited ice cream throughout the museum. For adults, check out some fun themed cocktails as well. 558 Broadway
New York (museumoficecream.com)

A major site of LGBTQ history, this Staten Island cottage was the home of one of America's earliest and most prolific female photographers. Alice Austen used the second-floor closet of this home as her darkroom, producing more than 7,000 photographs of a rapidly changing New York City. The home now houses a large collection of her work, as well as frequent exhibitions of contemporary shutterbugs. 

Established on the site of the US Light House Service General Depot on Staten Island, National Lighthouse Museum grew out the lighthouse preservation movement that began in the 1980s with the idea of saving the country's maritime heritage. The museum permanent exhibits include displays of model lighthouses (more than 180 in all), lanterns and other installations devoted to recounting the history of lighthouses (from ancient times to the present) and the daily routine of lighthouse keepers.

Though not as easily accessible by public transit as most NYC museums, this Queens County treasure is well worth the bus trek or car ride. As the city’s longest continually farmed site in the city (it’s been in operation since 1697), the 47 acres feels like an entirely different world compared to Manhattan. Feed and pet the barnyard animals, including sheep, ponies and goats, hop aboard a hayride and come back during the fall harvest season when you can go pumpkin picking and attempt to find your way through the Amazing Maize Maze (yes, that’s a corn maze).

Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch has transformed his enormous Brooklyn brownstone into a preserved catalog of all the animals on Noah’s Ark and in the rest of the Old Testament. Besides the jauntily-arranged taxidermy, the museum features fantastic artifacts like 2,300-year-old Greek dreidels and 6th-century throwing daggers. If you’ve got the chutzpah, you’re welcome to touch the treasures.