You’ve walked past the Metropolitan Museum. You’ve done MoMA. You’ve nodded respectfully at the Natural History Museum’s blue whale. But I’m going to tell you about a museum in Williamsburg that costs $7, fits inside what used to be a storefront, and contains, among other things: antique dentures, a rope that held the mourning drape at City Hall after 9/11, a shrine to Jackie Robinson, and a collection of Statue of Liberty figurines assembled by a man named Dave.
This is the City Reliquary. And it is, without question, one of the most purely New York things in New York.
The Museum That Almost Wasn’t
The City Reliquary started not as a museum but as a window display. In 2002, a Brooklyn man named Dave Herman began arranging objects in the window of his apartment — little artifacts of New York City life, things people had thrown away or forgotten about — and inviting passersby to look. Fragments of the old Coney Island boardwalk. Vintage tokens from the subway. Bits and pieces of a city in constant demolition and reinvention.
People stopped and stared. Then they started contributing their own objects. The window became a community collection, and the community collection eventually moved into a proper storefront at 370 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where it has been quietly welcoming the curious ever since.
It’s run as a nonprofit civic organization — part museum, part community archive, part love letter to a city that moves so fast it forgets its own history. The people who work here are not professionals who landed a prestigious museum job. They are New Yorkers who simply believe that the strange, small, overlooked details of this city deserve to be saved.
What’s Inside
Walking into the City Reliquary is like stepping into someone’s very well-organized fever dream about New York. The permanent collection is arranged in glass cases and on shelves, and it rewards slow looking.
There’s the shrine to Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers — a heartfelt tribute to the team that broke baseball’s color barrier and then broke Brooklyn’s heart when they left for Los Angeles in 1957. Fans of a certain age still haven’t quite forgiven Walter O’Malley.
There are artifacts from the 1939–40 and 1964–65 World’s Fairs, both held in Queens — including promotional ephemera, tickets, and photographs of the Unisphere and the Trylon and Perisphere that once defined an optimistic vision of American futurity. The World’s Fair artifacts carry a particular melancholy: objects made to celebrate the future, now elderly relics themselves.
There’s an interactive display dedicated to Little Egypt, the 19th-century burlesque dancer who scandalized New York and practically invented the belly dance craze that swept the country after the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. She performed in Coney Island and helped make New York the center of spectacular, transgressive entertainment it would remain for the next 130 years.
And then there’s Dave Herman’s Statue of Liberty collection — dozens of figurines, replicas, and renditions of Lady Liberty in every material and size imaginable. Dave, the museum’s founder, has been collecting these for years, and the cumulative effect of seeing them all together is unexpectedly moving. How many times has this image been reproduced? How many people have stood in front of the real thing and felt something they couldn’t quite name?
Perhaps the most quietly devastating object in the collection is a piece of rope. A single rope that was used to hang the mourning drape over New York City Hall in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. Unremarkable as an object. Unmistakable in its weight.
The Temporary Exhibitions
The Reliquary rotates temporary exhibitions that dig into specific corners of New York history and culture — neighborhood stories, forgotten industries, the lives of people who built this city without leaving much behind in the official record. Past exhibitions have explored the history of Coney Island’s amusement parks, the culture of NYC’s bowling leagues, and the lost world of Times Square before the renovation.
Check their website before you visit — the exhibitions change regularly, and the programming (film series, curator talks, workshops) often has the feeling of a neighborhood gathering rather than a formal museum event.
Why It Matters
There’s something the big museums can’t do, something that takes a place exactly this small and scrappy to accomplish: the City Reliquary makes you feel the specific texture of New York life, not its official history. The Dodgers weren’t just a baseball team — they were a community. The subway tokens aren’t just transit history — they’re the exact objects that millions of people palmed every single morning for decades. The rope from City Hall is not a symbol. It’s a rope. Someone tied it. Someone untied it. And somehow it ended up here, in a storefront in Williamsburg, keeping watch.
New York is always tearing itself down and building itself back up. The City Reliquary is in the business of remembering what gets lost in the demolition. That turns out to be a radical act.
INSIDER TIP: The museum hosts “community collection days” periodically where New Yorkers bring in objects they want to donate to the collection. If you have something — anything — that feels like a piece of the city’s story, check their website. They might want it.
How to Visit: The City Reliquary
Address: 370 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211 (Williamsburg)
Hours: Thursday–Sunday, 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM (closed Monday–Wednesday)
Nearest Subway: G train to Metropolitan Ave/Lorimer Street (2-minute walk); L train to Lorimer Street (5-minute walk)
Cost: $7 suggested donation
Tips:
– Plan to spend 45–90 minutes — the collection rewards slow looking
– The museum is small but dense; don’t rush
– Gift shop items make excellent and genuinely unusual NYC souvenirs
– Combine with a walk along Metropolitan Avenue for Williamsburg’s best vintage shops and cafés
Phone: (718) 782-4842
Website: cityreliquary.org
This Sunday, skip the museum you’ve already been to. The one you haven’t been to costs $7, fits in a storefront, and might just make you love this city more than you already do.
