The City Reliquary: the museum born from a storefront window in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

In Williamsburg, at the corner where the signs of the bars and the subway lines meet, there is a space barely wider than a shop called The City Reliquary. It's a non-profit civic museum devoted to the small-scale history of New York and its five boroughs: not the postcard monuments, but the objects the city produced, lost, and forgot. The address is 370 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211.

How it started

The story of how it came to be explains well what you find inside. In 2002 the founder, Dave Herman, turned the window of his apartment, at the corner of Havemeyer and Grand Street, into a small display visible from the street. Anyone who stopped to look discovered a button on the outside wall: pressing it triggered a recording of Herman's voice guiding visitors through the objects on show, including a set of dentures recovered at Dead Horse Bay and some Statue of Liberty figurines. On the wall Herman had also hand-painted directions to nearby landmarks, noting for instance that the Williamsburg Bridge was 1.3 miles to the west. In January 2006 the collection moved a few blocks over, to the current storefront on Metropolitan Avenue; the opening, on April 1, 2006, had its ribbon cut by the then Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz.

The collection

What you see today is a permanent collection made of urban relics, some curious, others moving. There is a shrine to Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers, memorabilia from New York's two World's Fairs (the 1939-40 one and that of 1964-65), and an interactive display on the career of Little Egypt, a late-nineteenth-century burlesque dancer. Herman's collection of Statue of Liberty figures, the original core of it all, is on show too. Among the more sober pieces is the rope that held the mourning drape on the balcony of City Hall after September 11. The logic of the place isn't grandeur but proximity: every object is something that passed through someone's hands, in this city.

The museum is also an active civic organization, with a calendar of events throughout the year: block parties, concerts in the yard, screenings, and recurring gatherings such as Collector's Night, Bike Fetish Day, and the Havemeyer Sugar Sweets Festival. It's worth checking the schedule if you happen to be in Brooklyn on the right days.

Hours

On hours it's best to be cautious: sources don't entirely agree. The museum's official page lists weekend opening, while a more recent listing notes it's open Thursday to Sunday, from noon to 6 p.m. Since hours can change, the sensible thing is to call ahead at (718) 782-4842 or check the website. Admission is by donation/modest contribution, in keeping with the non-profit nature of the place.

Getting there

Getting there is easy by subway: the G line stops at Metropolitan Avenue, the L at Lorimer Street, the J/M/Z at Marcy Avenue; local buses run above ground. From any stop it's a few minutes' walk. It's the kind of stop that pairs well with a day on foot through Williamsburg, perhaps before or after a stroll across the bridge: small, specific, and run by people who genuinely care about these objects.