The Skyscraper Museum

The Skyscraper Museum is tucked away at the southern tip of Battery City. It's intimate gallery space provides hours of detailed research and houses original architectural models of Burj Khalifa, the World Trade Center, and others.

While the museum's exhibit space is more in line with a gallery than full-size museum, architect nerds will find it's packed with plenty of jewels. The museum consists of two permenant exhibits: The History of Height, featuring the original Burj Khalifa model, and The World Trade Center Exhibit, housing one of the two original foam core models of the Minoru Yamasaki towers. 

"Ten and Taller" is the current exhibit, and it focuses on New York's earliest skyscrapers, surveying every building in Manhattan of ten or more stories - 250 in all - from the all masonry skyscrapers of the mid 1870s to the standardized steel skeletons at the turn of the twentieth century. The exhibition maps and graphs their location, uses, and heights, tracing an urban development of the city's commercial expansion and vertical rise. 

skyscraper.org

Hours are 12pm - 6pm, Wednesday - Sunday. General admission is $5, $2.50 for students and seniors.