Here’s a question for you: what do a 1994 blue MetroCard, a bottle of subway rail dust, a chunk of bedrock from deep below the city’s streets, and a fragment of terracotta from a demolished Gilded Age mansion have in common?
They are all treasures. They’re just not the kind of treasures that most museums want.
The City Reliquary does.
It Started in a Window
In 2002, a Williamsburg resident named Dave Herman started arranging odd New York City artifacts in his apartment window — the kind of window display that would make you stop on the sidewalk and squint. Old postcards. Subway tokens. Peculiar bits of the city’s physical history.
People kept stopping. Kept looking. Kept wanting more.
By 2006, Herman’s collection had grown so large that it needed its own home. He found a space on Metropolitan Avenue, incorporated as a nonprofit, and opened The City Reliquary to the public on April 1, 2006 — a date that suited the museum’s spirit perfectly.
Twenty years later, it is still there. Still weird. Still wonderful. And still deeply, unapologetically in love with New York City in a way that the big institutions — the Met, the MoMA, the Natural History Museum — can never quite replicate, because the City Reliquary loves the city not as high culture but as lived experience.
What’s Inside
The collection is deceptively large for a space that could fit inside a Manhattan studio apartment. The permanent displays include Statue of Liberty postcards spanning more than a century — a miniature history of how New York has sold itself to the world. There are subway tokens from a dozen different eras, each a tiny bronze artifact of a transit system that once required you to physically carry proof of payment in your pocket. There are geological core samples pulled from the bedrock beneath the city’s streets, proof that Manhattan is built on something ancient and unyielding.
There are paint chips from the L train platform wall. A shovel described simply, on its label, as “very old.” A small glass bottle of New York City subway rail dust, presented as though it were a sacred relic — which, in a way, it is. There are cobblestones from streets that no longer exist, and cornerstones from buildings that were demolished before anyone thought to care.
Walking through the City Reliquary, you feel the weight of the city differently. Every artifact here was made, touched, ridden, or discarded by someone who lived in New York. The terracotta fragment on the shelf was once part of a building someone walked into every day. The MetroCard in the case was once in someone’s pocket on a Tuesday morning. The subway token was dropped into a turnstile by someone who is now, in all probability, a great-grandparent.
That’s the magic of this place. It makes the ordinary sacred.
The Rotating Exhibitions
In addition to its permanent collection, the City Reliquary hosts rotating community exhibitions — shows curated by neighborhood organizations, local collectors, and ordinary New Yorkers with extraordinary niche obsessions. Past exhibitions have included collections of vintage NYC restaurant menus, a tribute to the city’s vanishing bodegas, and community archives from Williamsburg’s Puerto Rican population. The museum functions as a civic institution as much as a cultural one, hosting events ranging from neighborhood historical discussions to community gatherings that connect old-timers with newcomers.
How to Visit
Address: 370 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211 (Williamsburg)
Subway: L to Lorimer Street (5-minute walk) or L to Bedford Avenue (10-minute walk)
Hours: Thursday–Sunday, 12:00 pm–6:00 pm
Admission: Suggested donation (pay what you can)
Phone: (718) 782-4842
It’s best to go on a weekday afternoon when the museum is quietest and you can linger without feeling rushed — the displays reward slow looking and reading every label.
Insider Tip: The window display at the front of the museum changes seasonally and is visible from the sidewalk even when the museum is closed. It’s been a Williamsburg landmark since 2002 — before most of the neighborhood’s current bars and restaurants existed. That window was the beginning of everything: a quiet act of love for the city, pressed against the glass for anyone who cared to look.
