In a City of Skyscrapers, Space for a Museum

Maybe it was inevitable, but things are looking up for the Skyscraper Museum.

The not-for-profit operation has bounced from place to place to place in the last six years. Then, after Sept. 11, it bounced again, surrendering gallery space to emergency teams assisting small-business owners devastated by the World Trade Center attacks.

But next year, the Skyscraper Museum, founded in 1996 by author and Columbia art historian Carol Willis to celebrate “the world’s foremost vertical metropolis,” will move into sleek, permanent quarters at the southern tip of Battery Park City.

“It’s a great fit for New York City,” said Daniel M. Abramson, associate professor of art history at Tufts University and author of the 2001 book “Skyscraper Rivals,” a study of the architecture of Wall Street. “More than any other city in the world, New York City is identified with the skyscraper and, probably more than any other city, with the 20th century.”

The museum, which Abramson said had a mission like “no other cultural institution,” will occupy 5,800 square feet--including a mezzanine--in a new, 38-story building that also houses the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Millennium Partners, developers of the high-rise, is making street-level space available to Willis so that the museum, at last, can stay put.

“The Skyscraper Museum has had a peripatetic existence,” said Philip Aarons, founding partner of Millennium Partners and a member of the Skyscraper Museum board of directors. “It seemed to me we could find an appropriate amount of space for the museum.”

Expediency is nothing new in the world of New York real estate, as Willis knows. She wrote a 1995 book called “Form Follows Finance,” describing how skyscraper design--”blueprints for profit,” as she says--was dictated in the prewar period by the expectations of real estate speculators. The bottom line--not beautiful architecture--was the priority.

Happily for Willis, the Skyscraper Museum does not have to contend with the exigencies of the market. In addition to rent-free space provided by Millennium, building costs of about $3 million will be covered by public, private and foundation sources.

Earlier this year, the Skyscraper Museum mounted an exhibit to commemorate what would have been the trade center’s 30th anniversary. Originally scheduled as a series of events at the Windows on the World restaurant in Tower One, the show was moved to the New York Historical Society, and material was added to reflect the tragedy. “Now the history of the skyscraper takes on a whole different dimension,” Willis said.

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Fred Bruning is a writer for Newsday, a Tribune company.