Oddities Museum Near Me in Brooklyn: The Morbid Anatomy Library at Industry City

The Morbid Anatomy Library is free, takes no appointments, and only opens its door on Saturdays and Sundays between noon and 5pm. You will find it on the second floor of Building 2 at 254 36th Street in Industry City, Room C248, a short walk from the 36th Street subway stop in Sunset Park. If you typed oddities museum near me hoping for a cabinet of curiosities rather than a ticketed blockbuster, this is the room New York's death-and-anatomy crowd has kept coming back to.

Industry City is a maze of former Bush Terminal warehouses, so the address alone will not get you upstairs. Head for Building 2 on 36th Street and look for the entrance beside Jus by Julie, the juice counter Morbid Anatomy itself names as the landmark. Take the stairs or elevator to the second floor and follow the corridor numbers to C248. From Manhattan, the D, N or R train to 36th Street in Brooklyn takes about 20 minutes, and the walk from the station to the building is under ten more.

Morbid Anatomy began as Joanna Ebenstein's blog about medical museums, anatomical art and the culture of death, then grew into talks, classes, books and trips. The Industry City space is a working library rather than a gallery with labels and a gift-shop exit. The organization describes it as hundreds of books and artifacts you can browse in person, with a shop selling signed and antique titles. That means you sit, pull a volume, and read, which no velvet-rope museum will let you do.

Expect the subjects the group has written and lectured about for nearly two decades: anatomical illustration, wax models, mourning customs, folk saints, taxidermy, spiritualism and the history of the cabinet of curiosities itself. The fun is in the adjacency, a Victorian embalming manual next to a study of Mexican Day of the Dead altars, or a photo book of European ossuaries beside a guide to tarot. Ask whoever is minding the room where your subject is shelved; it saves a lot of slow scanning.

Between the bookcases sit the kinds of objects that made the old Morbid Anatomy name: skulls, glass domes, botanical and medical prints, and small specimens that you look at rather than handle. It is not a large hoard, and that is the point. In a single room you can actually study each piece instead of drifting past cases. Bring a notebook if you draw; the anatomical prints and the light from the factory windows make this one of the better rainy-afternoon sketching spots in Brooklyn.

The shop corner is where most visitors spend money, and it leans literary. Morbid Anatomy publishes and stocks its own titles, carries signed copies from speakers who have presented at its events, and keeps a shelf of antique books that turn over quickly. If you want a Halloween present for the friend who already owns every Edward Gorey paperback, this is a better hunting ground than any Fifth Avenue store. Signed copies tend to go first after a big talk, so weekend visits after a lecture are the best time to look.

Late October is the busiest stretch on the Morbid Anatomy calendar. The official events feed lists weekend library visits on October 18 and 25, an Open House New York visit on October 18, and a drop-in tarot salon held in the library room later in the month. Online talks this season include A Gothic Feast and a Samhain lecture. Looking further ahead, the in-person Krampus Holiday Market is listed for November 15, 2026, and it is the group's main in-person event of the late fall.

The room is small, so timing matters more than at a big museum. Arrive right at noon on Saturday and you will often have the shelves nearly to yourself for half an hour. By mid-afternoon, especially on weekends with Industry City food markets, the corridor fills with browsers. Skip the October 18 open-house afternoon if you want quiet reading time, because that day draws first-timers on organized itineraries. Last-minute arrivals near 5pm get rushed, so plan at least an hour before closing.

Because the library keeps weekend-only hours, a weekday visit means a locked door. If you arrive to find the room at capacity, wait downstairs in the Industry City courtyards for twenty minutes; turnover is fast because most people browse rather than linger. If you have your heart set on death-history in a single day, Green-Wood Cemetery's main gate at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street is a twenty-minute walk north and pairs naturally with this stop.

The crowd mirrors the Morbid Anatomy talk audience: artists looking for anatomical reference, history readers, tarot people drawn by the salon, and pairs on an offbeat Brooklyn date. The unspoken rule is library manners: voices low, books back where you found them, and photos only of the room rather than whole pages. Whoever is staffing the desk can point you to the shelf for your particular obsession.

Joanna Ebenstein started Morbid Anatomy as a blog in the late 2000s, documenting anatomical collections and the strange beauty of medical history. Lectures followed, then a book series, then a public museum that operated in Gowanus during the mid-2010s before closing. The library is what survived that era: a reading collection sustained by classes, trips and the shop. Its current program still mixes Brooklyn evenings with international travel, including an October Day of the Dead trip to San Luis Potosí, Mexico.

Leaving Building 2, walk uphill to Sunset Park itself, whose hilltop lawn between 41st and 44th Streets looks back over the harbor to the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan. Continue up to Eighth Avenue for Brooklyn's Chinatown, where bakeries and dumpling counters line the avenue through the 50s. If you would rather stay indoors, Industry City's own food hall sits steps from the library, so you can turn a book browse into a long Brooklyn lunch without crossing a street.

Hours: Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5pm. Admission: free, with no appointment needed. Address: 254 36th Street, Building 2, Room C248, Brooklyn, NY 11232. Subway: D, N or R to 36th Street. The space is a single upstairs room in an old factory building, so large groups should split up. The subway beats driving on Industry City market weekends, when the surrounding blocks fill up. Bring a tote if you plan to buy antique books, since the shop wraps simply.

Go if you are drawn to medical history, gothic literature, folk ritual or the idea of a cabinet of curiosities you are allowed to touch with your eyes for as long as you like. Skip it if you want big dramatic specimens behind glass; the library is about reading and conversation, and the impressive objects are few. For a full oddities day, pair it with Green-Wood in the morning and a dumpling lunch on Eighth Avenue, and you will understand why Brooklyn's strange-history fans treat this room like a clubhouse.