Walk past 687 Broadway and you might miss it. The storefront is unassuming — a glass door, a small sign, the kind of frontage that disappears between the louder shops of Greenwich Village. But push through that door and you’ve stepped into something that shouldn’t quite exist: a working retail store that looks, sounds, and feels like the back rooms of the American Museum of Natural History — except everything has a price tag.
This is The Evolution Store. It has been here, in some form, since 1993. And once you’ve been inside, you start telling people about it.
What’s Actually In There
The first thing you notice is scale. Cases of mounted butterflies — iridescent blue morphos, swallowtails the size of your hand — line the walls. Beetles pinned in glass shadowboxes. Drawers full of fossils: trilobites, ammonites, fragments of dinosaur bone you can hold in your palm. Skulls and skeletons, articulated and labeled. Meteorites under glass. Tribal art. Antique medical models. Glass eyes in a case, sorted by color.
It is, technically, a store. But the way most people experience it is as a museum that happens to let you leave with the exhibit. Nothing is roped off. You can pick things up. You can ask questions. The staff, who tend to know exactly what you’re holding, will tell you where it came from and how old it is.
How It Started
Evolution opened in 1993 at 120 Spring Street in SoHo, founded as a place where natural history specimens — the kind usually only found in research collections — could be sold to private collectors, designers, schools, and the merely curious. As SoHo rents climbed, the store moved north to its current home on Broadway near West 3rd Street, in NoHo, on the southern edge of Greenwich Village.
It has outlasted every other oddities shop that tried to copy it. Obscura Antiques in the East Village — the one from the Discovery Channel show — closed in 2019. The Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn shut down years before that. Evolution kept going. Partly because it never tried to be macabre theater. It’s a science store with the soul of a Victorian curiosity cabinet, and that turns out to be more durable than goth aesthetic alone.
What to Look For
If you’re going just to look, head straight for the back of the store. That’s where the larger pieces live — the articulated skeletons, the bigger taxidermy, the rare fossils. The front is the gateway: smaller specimens, books, gift items. The back is where the store earns its reputation.
If you’re going to buy something, the butterfly shadowboxes are a good entry point. Beautifully displayed, ethically sourced from butterfly farms, and surprisingly affordable. The fossils are the other accessible category — a real 400-million-year-old trilobite for less than the cost of dinner in the West Village.
Insider Tip: The store is closed on Sundays — it’s the one quirk that catches every first-time visitor. Plan a Saturday afternoon instead, around 2 p.m. when the light through the front windows hits the butterfly cases. That’s when the place looks the way it deserves to look.
Why It Belongs on Your List
New York has plenty of strange. Every neighborhood has a thing. But what Evolution does — and almost nobody else does it — is collapse the distance between museum and store. You’re not behind glass watching a curator’s choice. You’re inside the cabinet. You can pull out a drawer of fossils. You can hold a meteorite in your hand and feel how dense iron from space actually is. You can take a piece of it home.
It’s the kind of store that makes the city feel a little wider than you remembered. There’s a tiny shop on Broadway with a meteorite from Mars in the window. That’s New York.
How to Visit
Address: 687 Broadway, New York, NY 10012 (between West 3rd and West 4th Streets)
Nearest Subway: Broadway-Lafayette (B/D/F/M) or 8th St-NYU (R/W), both under 5 minutes’ walk
Hours: Monday through Saturday, 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM
Closed: Sundays
Cost: Free to browse. Specimens range from a few dollars to thousands.
Phone: (212) 343-8047
Bring time. The first visit always takes longer than you expect. Bring a friend who’s curious about everything — Evolution rewards the kind of person who reads every label.
Make a Day of It
The store sits on the seam between Greenwich Village, NoHo, and SoHo, which is one of the best walking corridors in Manhattan. Wander south after your visit and you’ll hit Houston, then SoHo’s cast-iron blocks. Wander north and you’re in the heart of Washington Square. Either direction works. Either direction has somewhere good to eat.
But Evolution is the anchor. It’s the reason for the trip. Every once in a while, you find a place in this city that reminds you why you live here — that the strange and the beautiful are still being curated by people who care, in storefronts you’d otherwise walk past. This is one of those places.
For more of NYC’s stranger corners, see New York’s $7 strangest museum and the SoHo apartment filled with 280,000 pounds of dirt.
