My spouse and I visited the City Reliquary on a Saturday
afternoon in mid-January 2020. The museum is open Thursdays through Sundays
(closed Mondays through Wednesdays) from 12:00 noon until 6:00 pm, although
those hours seem slightly fluid because the museum attendant did not show up
until 12:30 pm on the day that we visited. Admission costs $7 per adult. We
spent about 30 minutes there.
The diminutive museum began in 2002 as the owner’s apartment
window display, but moved to its present storefront location on busy
Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg a few years later. It occupies the street
level of a row of businesses (shops, restaurants) with housing above it. The museum’s
collection includes memorabilia from New York City and Brooklyn, as well as
rotating temporary exhibit. The space is quite small, just three tiny rooms
packed floor-to-ceiling with souvenirs and mementos. (We learned after our
visit that the space also includes a garden, but no one mentioned it to us when
we paid our entrance fee, and a door at the rear of the back room did not encourage
us to continue our tour outside). A restroom is available.
Unfortunately, we
really did not really enjoy this museum; it was smaller than we had envisioned,
and many of the objects displayed were also small with hard-to-read signs, plus
some of the exhibits with moving parts (such as a movie and a booth that
projected a film about the burlesque dancer Little Egypt were not even
operational. We would not really recommend this attraction; save your time and
money.
