11. The Skyscraper Museum at the Bottom of a Skyscraper
The Skyscraper Museum occupies the ground floor of the 38-story Millennium Point, a hotel and apartment that opened in 2002. The museum features exhibitions and artifacts focused on high-rise buildings and the people behind them. In the late 1990s, the museum started as a group of pop-up exhibitions before eventually finding a home just a short walk from the World Trade Center. After 9/11, the museum shuttered until 2004 when it relocated to Battery Park City, making it the first museum to reopen in Lower Manhattan after the attacks.
Since reopening, the museum has featured a number of exhibitions on the history of skyscrapers in New York and abroad. The museum put on an exhibit on the construction of the World Trade Center and its subsequent architectural history in 2006. A few years after, the museum focused on the architecture of Shanghai, including the iconic Shanghai Tower, using photography, architectural drawings, film, and other multimedia. The museum has also dedicated space to an exhibit on “supertalls,” or buildings that stand taller than the Empire State Building.