New York: Skyscraper Museum New York: is it a towering success?

Skyscraper Museum New York (3), originally uploaded by garybembridge.

As a bit of a geek about things like tall buildings, big constructions and the like, I was excited to see that near to the hotel we were staying in at Battery Park New York, was an interesting sounding museum called “The Skyscraper Museum”. A visit to the website at http://www.skyscraper.org made it seem a must see visit for building geeks. I assumed it would be as interesting as some of the kind of documentaries on Discovery Channel (I did warn I was a bit geeky on these things!).

The museum was literally about 50 yards from the hotel at 39 Battery Place. And the warning should have been there when it was clearly quiet and the bored lady on reception had a mobile phone stuck to her ear gossiping away to someone, while she put out her hand for the $5 each entrance fee and then mumbled about going up the ramp and that the museum was on one floor.

To call the place a museum is misleading. At best it could be called an “exhibition”. It was really disappointing and not worth the visit.

The place itself is very well designed and laid out. It has great big murals on the ramp, a mirror style ceiling and metal floor. But then all there is are some oversized photos of New York and Hong Kong, some photos of tall buildings and a few architects models of the new flagship building for Ground Zero and a few others. There are some models used in air tunnels when designing skyscrapers, and a movie projected on a wall about the Twin Towers being built.

There is a small bookshop in reception with some standard but interesting books on skyscrapers.

I think we were in the place about 20 minutes and had pretty much done it.

This was a real disappointment, as the city known for skyscrapers you would have thought there was more to tell and show. Not worth going to.