Most people visiting New York City tackle the standard museum bucket list: Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Cloisters.
But if those are the only museums you're exploring in New York, then you're missing out on so many others that make New York the melting pot of extraordinary weird and delightfully obscure exhibitions that you wouldn't find any other place in the world.
"I'm all for visiting big museums like the Museum of Natural History, the MET and the Guggenheim - they're beautiful and hold an endless number of art pieces that you can't experience anywhere else," says Shiwon Oh, who formerly worked at the Voelker Orth Museum and the Bird Garden. "But the smaller museums scattered throughout the boroughs hold a different encounter that's more intimate and real than the others."
Oh's favorites: the house museums (museums that were formerly homes) because they hold the history of the families who used to live there, as well as the history of their local neighborhood.
At the Voelker Orth Museum in Queens, where Oh used to work, visitors could see pivotal milestones that the family went through as German immigrants; but they could also learn about Queens in the early 1900s.
A major difference between the small and the major museums is the focus. The smaller museums often have more of a narrow focus or theme, which sometimes makes the act of visiting a museum not as daunting, says Tasia Duske, CEO of Museum Hack, a tour company that leads unconventional museum tours throughout the country.
Duske says that's why so many museums like the Museum of Ice Cream have been successful - they tell the visitor exactly what they are getting into and how they should prepare for it.
Another bonus: you can eschew the crowds.
"Smaller museums are often less crowded and offer the visitor the opportunity to not be rushed through the space," Duske says. "We all want to slow down more and be present, and a smaller museum can facilitate that in ways the larger ones often cannot."
The only issue is that there are so many tiny museums throughout New York City that it can be hard to choose (such a fun problem to have).
Samiha Ahmed, travel expert and co-founder of the travel discovery app Burdie, says her favorite lesser-known museum is the Transit Museum, which is located in a real underground subway station.
"It's the perfect place to learn more about one of the city's most iconic features: the subway," Ahmed says. "The Transit Museum is very interactive and usually not crowded."
She also loves the Louis Armstrong House Museum, which is a museum dedicated to the life of the famous jazz museum. It's located inside his former home in Queens, and tours of the intimate space include original furnishings, as well as personal voice recordings from Armstrong and his wife, Lucille.
Becca Siegel, a Brooklyn-based travel blogger with Halfhalftravel, has completely different favorites.
She loves to explore the Museum at FIT (free), the Alexander Hamilton museum at Hamilton Grange National Memorial (you can peek inside his preserved farmhouse) and the Museum at Eldridge Street, which is a preserved synagogue (go for a total time warp to see detailed architecture in the Lower East Side).
"With all the different types of cultures mixing and all the groups of people who have histories in this city, it pays to visit some special museums like the preserved historic sites, special exhibits and museums dedicated to cultural groups," Siegel says.
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