2024
Open House New York Weekend
Deep inside the city your memory remains
Another year, another Open House New York Weekend. This year OHNY went beyond just Saturday and Sunday by providing solid programming starting on Friday, and this year I was able to take advantage of the extra day allowing me to visit more sites than I ever have before. Since there’s so much to get to, we’re going to get started where I started with a reserved tour of the Morgan Library in Murray Hill. The tour focused on a recent restoration of the Charles McKim library building, where we focused on the exterior and the garden, learning about the nonexistent mortar joints and the nonexistent vapor barrier, among other nonexistent things. The pictures skip the exterior and garden and instead show what’s inside instead, since I’ll use any excuse I can to take even more pictures inside Morgan’s original library, one of the prettiest rooms in the whole damn city.
I’ll try and present these in chronological order this year, although don’t hold me to that. After the Morgan Library we’re staying in Midtown to visit the Institute for Classical Art and Architecture’s Cast Hall, which was more like a decent sized room as opposed to a full-fledged hall. That’s not an insult, just an observation.
The Cast Hall has been a long time Open House New York site and also a long-time member of my Open House shortlist of sights to see, one that it took me all these years to actually visit. When I put together my shortlist every year, I usually am drawn to some shiny new site or something far away that takes forever to get to. This year there were a lot of great things to see, but I tried to focus on places I hadn’t been to before (I was mostly successful with that) and split my time in Manhattan and Brooklyn, using Open House New York’s handy map feature to circle down on nearby open access sites, which is why after all these years on my shortlist, I finally found time to visit the Cast Hall. a
We’re only three stops in and I’m already breaking all of my rules here at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York. First it’s a site I visited before, although it was many years ago, in fact it was so long ago that they were still able to have and enforce a no photo policy way back then. The other rule we’re breaking is that we’re completely ignoring chronological order, although there’s a good reason for that this time. The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York is located in the same building as the Cast Hall but was closed on Friday. So while we may be ignoring chronological time, at least we’re not ignoring geographical conventions.
Our next stop is in Lower Manhattan at the Skyscraper Museum, a place that I should like more than I do. Ever since MoMA decided to scatter their architecture and design department, it’s one of the few consistent places that still offer actual architecture exhibits in the city. Still, its gallery size is almost comically small and I really only when it’s free to visit on Open House New York Weekend, and even then it’s usually just a quick stopover between subway rides.
After the Skyscraper Museum, it was a short walk to the J Train and a trip over the bridge to Marcy Avenue and Williamsburg for our last two stops on Friday. The first of those last stops is STREB, where the pictures will not capture how much fun this site really was. STREB is a dance troupe, although that description is not quite accurate. OHNY allowed us in to watch a rehearsal, and the dancer’s backgrounds (everything from circuses to gymnastics to cheer to modern dance) were needed to practice and perform really interesting, very athletic routines that were great to watch.
My highlight on Friday was a reserved tour of One Domino Square, two new residential towers designed by Selldorf Architects. The building took us up into an apartment with great, close-up views of the Williamsburg Bridge, and then to the amenity floors in the shared podium, including a double height indoor pool and all the views of the bridge you could ever hope to have.
Open House New York Weekend rolls on with all open access (also known as non-reserved) sites on Saturday and Sunday. First up is TAD, which featured a beautiful wrapped video arch at its entry. The office and production areas were also interesting enough, although if I’m being honest, nothing beat the impact of that arch.
I went from TAD next to Town Hall, only a ten minute walk away. I have seen a few concerts in Town Hall (including a terrific Bright Eyes with Gillian Welch and Ben Gibbard residency and an all star folk concert for the film Inside Llewelyn Davis that included just about everyone), but never really knew its history. The tour was like a living Wikipedia article (in a good way), and its history is pretty fascinating and worth looking up. The tour did prohibit pictures in the theater itself, it was hosting a sound check for The Dannys, an award show honoring disabled musicians, and while those musicians may be disabled, they were still most certainly very loud, making the whole information filled tour almost comically hard to hear at times.
What’s there not to love about Kevin Roche’s Ford Foundation Building? It was open once again for Open House New York, and a visit to its eleventh floor is one of the best uses of your time during any Open House New York Weekend.
I finished up Saturday at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I had been there before during Open House New York Weekend, maybe ten years ago, maybe longer. This time, for whatever reason, I found myself thinking more and more about how the Navy Yard is surprisingly anti-urban in a borough and a city that is quite the opposite. First off the Navy Yard, which houses all sorts of interesting spaces and businesses, is not open to the public. And it also has a surprising amount of surface parking, something you just don’t see in that part of Brooklyn. Even the food hall- which is also open to the public- had lunch specials to keep employees trapped in the compound instead of going out beyond its gates and into the city. It kind of makes you wonder why the place (and its tenants) are even in Brooklyn to begin with.
It’s already Sunday and we have another big day planned, starting with UMBAU at the Goethe Institute near Union Square. UMBAU is an architecture exhibit by gmp, and the Goethe Institute is your German language home in New York, a place where you can read German books and see a bunch of German ducks on a shelf (or Deutsche Enten auf einem Regal, according to Google Translate.
Forget all about the Germans, our next stop heads north (and by north I mean just past East 37th Street on Park Avenue) to Scandinavia House, your Scandinavian cultural headquarters in New York. Here you can eat at the Bjork Cafe or see a presentation in Volvo Hall, or just buy some some Scandinavian chocolate with fun Scandinavian names that I am guaranteed to mispronounce.
We’re leaving Manhattan behind for our next stop, the City Reliquary Museum in Williamsburg. I’m not sure that the word museum is appropriate here, but the words City and Reliquary are pretty on point. Here there are a few small rooms jam packed with, um, I guess the most forgiving term is probably knick knacks. It’s a bit like you are in a hoarder’s basement at times, although still worth a stop on Open House New York Weekend.
We’re taking the L train a little deeper into Brooklyn and finishing things up in Bushwick. One of the reasons I love Open House New York Weekend so much is that it provides a solid reason to go to places I haven’t been before. Over the years many of my favorite sites have been outside of Manhattan, places like the Marcel Breuer buildings in the Bronx or the Newtown Creek digester eggs in Queens. This year I visited two sites in Bushwick in Brooklyn, both were among my favorites this year.
Careful readers may have noticed that four of five boroughs were mentioned in that last paragraph, with only Staten Island being left out. Even though this is my 22nd consecutive Open House New York Weekend and I’ve been to hundreds of sites at this point, I still haven’t made it out to Staten Island yet. Maybe one year I’ll finally go to see that lighthouse museum out there, although even that feels like a 2025 Open House New York weekend shortlist long-shot.
Our first Bushwick stop is at Allison Eden Studios, a working workshop where custom glass mosaics are designed and built. These pictures show just a small sample of what she was working on inside, as well as a giant shoe just waiting for us out on Cook Street.
Our last site this year is Carroll Hall in Bushwick, an event space in Bushwick by Dameron Architects. It has a lot about it to like, starting with the exterior brick wall and leading to a wonderful hidden garden.
Hidden in the hidden garden was the treehouse, tucked in the back up a small hill. The architects said it was called a storage building on the drawings, but in reality calling it a treehouse is probably a better description. No matter what you call it, it’s still a great place to end this year’s Open House New York weekend as we all patiently wait for whatever sites end up open in 2025.
Keep going back in time.
See National Sawdust, 25 Kent Avenue and Powerhouse Arts during Open House New York 2023 next…
