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Learning About New York City With the Kids
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Tenement Museum
Exploring a Tenement: 1933
103 Orchard St, New York, NY 10002, USA
Suitable for
Teens
Join us for an exploration of the research, preservation, and restoration work that goes into every Tenement Museum tour. Learn about Italian immigrants Adolfo and Rosaria Baldizzi, and their American-born children Johnny and Josephine as they navigated tenement life during the Great Depression. Visit the Baldizzi’s recreated tenement home, discover how we learned about the family, and get a special look at the unique process of reconstructing their 1933 apartment and the discoveries and surprises made along the way.
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Museum of the City of New York
Timescapes
1220 5th Ave, New York, NY 10029, USA
Suitable for
Teens
Watch the history of New York City unfold in this 28-minute film, with showtimes every 40 minutes starting at 10:20 am.
How do you fit the Big Apple onto the small screen? Timescapes, the Museum’s award-winning short documentary, explores how New York City grew from a settlement of a few hundred Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans into the metropolis we know today and features animated maps and archival photographs, prints, and paintings from the Museum’s collections. Now expanded and updated, the film's final chapter captures the astonishing – if sometimes challenging – transformations the city has experienced in the first decades of the 21st century.
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Children Museum of Manhattan
Superpowered Metropolis: Early Learning City
212 W 83rd St, New York, NY 10024, USA
Suitable for
Young Kids
Superpowered Metropolis: Early Learning City™ is a hands-on, interactive, and colorfully, immersive exhibition where you are the heroes! Step into a playful, comic book version of New York City where a lively team of pigeons, Zip, Zap, and Zoom, serve as your guides to superpowered fun and learning.
The 1,500 square-foot exhibit invites children from birth to 6 and their grown-ups to feel like heroes, building their superpowered early learning brain skills together. These skills, known as executive functions, include self-control, working memory, and mental flexibility. Children practice these learning “superpowers” with Zip, Zap, and Zoom, who guide families on a series of NYC adventures exploring the subways, parks, music, travel, treehouses, and more.
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Tenement Museum
Meet Victoria
103 Orchard St, New York, NY 10002, USA
Suitable for
Teens
Journey back in time to 1916 for an immersive experience with an actor playing Victoria Confino, a real teenager who immigrated to the United States in 1913. You'll meet Victoria in her family's recreated tenement apartment exhibit inside the Manny Cantor Center and get to ask Victoria questions and hear stories about her home in Greece, her journey to the United States, and her experiences as an immigrant in the Lower East Side of 1916.
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Tenement Museum
Exploring a Tenement: 1902
103 Orchard St, New York, NY 10002, USA
Suitable for
Teens
Join us for an exploration of the research, preservation, and restoration work that goes into every Tenement Museum tour. Learn about Jewish immigrants Harris and Jennie Levine as they ran a small factory and raised five children in this rapidly growing Jewish neighborhood, and how women in tenements formed community and managed conflict. Visit the Levine’s recreated tenement home, discover how we learned about the family, and get a special look at the unique process of reconstructing their 1902 apartment and what we’ve learned from 30 years of working in ‘ordinary’ buildings.
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New-York Historical Society
The Waldorf Astoria Lobby Clock
170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024, USA
Suitable for
Teens
Meet us at the clock! The great Waldorf Astoria clock is a legendary part of New York City lore and a meeting spot for generations of New Yorkers. Originally made for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, it was crafted in London and features relief portraits of Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, and Grover Cleveland, and Queen Victoria of England.
For decades, the towering clock graced the Waldorf Astoria—both at its first location on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street and in the lobby of the hotel's longtime address at Park Avenue and 50th Street. This time-keeping treasure recently underwent a meticulous restoration and is on view in the Smith Gallery during the hotel’s renovation.
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New York Transit Museum
On the Streets
99 Schermerhorn St, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA
Suitable for
Teens
New York’s Trolleys and Buses tells the story of above ground mobility and surface transit from the early 1800s to the present. A 12-seat city bus, “fishbowl” bus cab, walk-don’t walk signs, parking meters, fire hydrants, traffic lights, and an array of other interactive “Street furniture” bring this exhibit to life. Visitors can also learn about the evolution of fuel technologies and its environmental impact.
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South Street Seaport Museum
12 Fulton St, New York, NY 10038, USA
Suitable for
Teens
South Street and the Rise of New York is an exhibition located in the entrance to the ground floor of the main Museum building. It explores the critical role played by the Seaport and South Street in securing New York’s place as America’s largest city and its rise to become the world’s busiest port by the start of the 20th century. The exhibition showcases the Museum’s vast collection of works or art and artifacts through large reproductions of objects and selected artifacts on display all related to the history of the Port of New York in the 19th century.
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Queens Museum
The Relief Map of the New York City Water Supply System
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Van Wyck Expressway, Queens, NY, USA
Suitable for
Teens
For the 1939 World’s Fair, city agencies were invited to produce exhibits for the New York City Pavilion, now the Queens Museum. Each exhibit shared “what the various branches of municipal government are doing to serve the citizens of today.
To educate New Yorkers about the water supply system, the Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity, created the relief map now displayed at the Queens Museum. A team of cartographers began work in 1938 with a depression-era budget of $100,000, roughly $1.5 million in today’s dollars. But at 540 square feet, the model was too big for the allotted space. Ten years later, it made its only public appearance in the City’s Golden Anniversary Exposition at Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace.
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Queens Museum
World's Fair Collection
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Van Wyck Expressway, Queens, NY, USA
Suitable for
Teens
The 1939-40 World’s Fair was conceived to commemorate the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration, revitalize New York’s economy, and create a major new park. The 1964-65 Fair coincided both with the 300th anniversary of New York City and the 25th anniversary of the 1939-40 World’s Fair. The Museum owns more than 10,000 objects related to those two iconic expositions. The World’s Fair Visible Storage was inaugurated after the Museum’s renovation in 2013, and features over 900 objects from the larger collection. It provides an opportunity for students, scholars, and the general public to view items formerly off-limits to the public. All of these items have been organized by donor so that the collections within the collection become evident.
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Queens Museum
Panorama of the City of New York
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Van Wyck Expressway, Queens, NY, USA
Suitable for
Teens
