5 Great Offbeat Museums In NYC
Because you can't look at Van Goghs and Monets all the time, New York City offers several museums dedicated to the quirky, the unusual, and the eccentric. Here are our five favorites. By Jessica Allen.
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This tiny museum in Brooklyn showcases one-offs and collections depicting and relating to New York, including old-fashioned postcards of the Statue of Liberty, actual samples of Manhattan schist, pens, trinkets, signs, globes, and other weird, wild stuff that celebrates the "local character" of this weird, wild city.
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Dedicated to "illuminat[ing] the patterns and structures all around us," the first museum of mathematics in the United States celebrates all things geometric, algebraic, numeric, imaginary, binary, spatial, and logical. Exhibits attempt to render the abstract concrete using interactive LEDs, lasers, and other technology. It all adds up to fun.
The Museum of Sex, um, straddles the line between porny and ninth-grade health class. Exhibits about how sex is depicted in street art (pictured) or in the movies, or showing the sex lives of animals or of robots provide insight into human sexuality in its complex, many-sided glory. Coming soon: PLAY, what the museum calls the "first-ever food-sex-art-cocktail bar."
Needless to say, the New York Transit Museum focuses on the good stuff. Located in a former subway station in Brooklyn Heights, the museum has space to exhibit hundreds of artifacts, from old turnstiles to ancient metal slugs used to avoid paying the 5-cent fare. The preserved cars, complete with maps and ads, are enough to fill even the most cynical of riders with civic pride.
Enclosed in a former freight elevator, Museum specializes in found objects—wacky, deteriorating stuff that somehow made their way out of their owners' hands and into this Tribeca alley. The opening exhibit in 2012 included such things as a collection of toothpaste from around the world, misspelled food labels from restaurant kitchens, Chinatown sex aids, and knock-off Sharpies.
