Museum Brings N.Y. Skyscrapers Back to Eye Level

Manhattan has museums of folk art, Chinese culture and maritime history.

But the city that is defined by its soaring buildings and the grand ambitions behind them has only now gotten a permanent place devoted to its world-famous skyline.

The Skyscraper Museum tells the story of New York’s development through its hulking masses of steel and granite.

The museum was founded in 1996 but shuttled between temporary locations until opening its permanent home in Lower Manhattan on Friday in a building it shares with a Ritz-Carlton hotel. Its home at 39 Battery Place puts it a few blocks from the World Trade Center site.

Unlike the towering structures it pays homage to, the 5,800-square-foot museum is squeezed into a small space.

But the museum feels much larger than it is. Its polished stainless steel floors and ceilings act as area-length mirrors that lend it the gleam and feel of a skyscraper.

The museum was the brain-child of Carol Willis, an architectural historian and Columbia University professor, who wanted New Yorkers to have a sense of the buildings they walk past every day.

“We’re a point of orientation to go to the real museum, which is the city and its buildings,” she said.

On Saturday, the museum attracted visitors with just that idea in mind.

“It is neat to absorb a little bit of this stuff and then have a new perspective on what you’ve seen for a long time,” said Erin Strumpf, a 27-year-old graduate student in health policy at Harvard University who was in New York on a weekend visit.

The museum has various World Trade Center photos and materials and will open a trade center exhibit in June.

But the museum’s sweep is broader. It (and its website, skyscraper.org) include information on other New York landmarks, such as the Woolworth and Empire State buildings, as well as buildings elsewhere in the country and the world.

The museum was always planned for Lower Manhattan -- that’s where New York’s first extra-tall buildings began popping up in the 1870s -- and design was under way long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Through an array of photo-graphs and drawings, the museum details not only the city’s architectural history, but also the economic and other forces behind its development.

For example, many of the tallest towers were built at the end of economic booms when land was the priciest, financing the loosest and egos the biggest, according to one display. Design and construction of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings occurred in the late 1920s before the Great Depression, Willis said.

“Everyone’s fascinated with skyscrapers,” said Jason Beerman, a worker at a nonprofit health company, as he toured the museum Saturday. “It’s a manifestation of human ego.”