The Window That Became a Museum
In 2002, a Williamsburg resident named Dave Herman started displaying odd New York City objects in the ground-floor windows of his Havemeyer Street apartment. A Statue of Liberty figurine. A vintage Coca-Cola bottle. A handwritten label explaining what each thing was and why it mattered. Neighbors started leaving things on his stoop.
By 2006 the project had outgrown the window. On April 1 of that year, with then-Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz cutting the ribbon, The City Reliquary opened in a storefront at 370 Metropolitan Avenue. It has been there ever since.
The museum is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It is run almost entirely by volunteers. Suggested donation: a few dollars.
What's in the Collection
The permanent display is small, dense, and idiosyncratic. A row of Statue of Liberty replicas, dozens of them, ranging from souvenir miniatures to a five-foot plaster cast. A glass case of subway tokens — the Y-cut bullseye from 1953, the brass solid-cut of the 1970s, the Y-shaped of 1980. A bottle of Brooklyn-bottled seltzer. A "tooth said to be Mark Twain's" — the label is honest about the source ambiguity.
The collection's animating principle is that the artifacts of a city are not only what its institutional museums choose to keep. They are also the souvenirs, the discarded tools, the working tokens, and the strange objects people end up holding onto.
The rotating exhibits, which change roughly quarterly, have included shows on neighborhood handball, the lost trolleys of Brooklyn, and the city's vanishing newsstands. Each is built from items donated or loaned by residents.
The Sidewalk Vitrine
If you walk past 370 Metropolitan when the museum is closed, the windows still do work. Two street-facing vitrines hold a smaller rotating display — viewable twenty-four hours, free, no admission required. The current setup includes a mounted bird from the Brooklyn Children's Museum's de-accessioned collection and a stack of vintage Yankees programs.
This is The City Reliquary's quiet thesis: a museum is a way of looking, not a place you have to be inside of.
Why It Works Here, Specifically
Williamsburg in 2002 was a different neighborhood — industrial waterfront, working-class Polish and Latino blocks, a small but growing artist population. The Reliquary was, in part, a way to anchor a sense of place against the rapid change everyone could already feel coming.
Twenty-plus years later, the L train rolls through gleaming Bedford Avenue, the warehouses are now condos, and the neighborhood has been written about so many times in so many trend pieces it has effectively become a national shorthand for gentrification. The City Reliquary, somehow, is still there. Still volunteer-run. Still asking five dollars.
The continuity is the point. The collection grows by accretion — donations from neighbors, found objects, items left by an aunt — rather than by curatorial ambition. Nothing on display feels permanent in the way Met objects feel permanent. Everything on display feels like it was placed there last Tuesday by someone who happened to drop by.
Annual Events
The Reliquary's calendar is half the institution. The Bicycle Fetish Day in May. The Mermaid Parade afterparty in June. The Egg Cream Festival in September — a celebration of the chocolate-syrup-and-seltzer Brooklyn invention that is, depending on who you ask, the city's most underrated drink.
The Egg Cream Festival is the closest the museum gets to a tourist event. It runs on a Saturday afternoon, free admission, with a U-Bet syrup tasting and a brief lecture on the drink's contested origins. The line goes around the block. Almost no one in it is a tourist.
How to Visit
The museum is small. Forty-five minutes will see all of it. Two hours, if you read every label and watch the rotating exhibit's video loop.
The volunteer at the door is usually a retired neighbor or a graduate student in museum studies. They will tell you what's new, what's been added since last month, and which case to look at first. This is part of the experience — it is the opposite of museum-as-monument.
The Long Tail of a Small Museum
It is easy to imagine a version of New York where places like the Reliquary do not survive. Rent goes up. The volunteer pool ages out. A larger institution buys the collection and absorbs it into a wing somewhere.
That has not happened. The Reliquary has weathered two recessions, a pandemic that closed it for eighteen months, and the routine churn of Williamsburg's commercial blocks. It is, in a literal sense, a working monument to the kind of city most people now think New York has stopped being.
The Egg Cream Festival is in September. Plan around it.
Practical notes
- Address: 370 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211.
- Getting there: L train to Lorimer Street, two blocks south. Or G to Metropolitan Avenue.
- Hours: Thursday through Sunday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Monday through Wednesday.
- Admission: Suggested donation $5. No one will turn you away.
- Don't miss: The Statue of Liberty wall, the rotating exhibit, the sidewalk vitrines (visible 24/7).
- Best timed with: The Egg Cream Festival in September, or Bicycle Fetish Day in May.
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Sources consulted: The City Reliquary · Wikipedia · NYC Tourism · 420 Kent · Yelp
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