Celebrating a Century

I know that this is the Big Apple you tuned in to see this year. But when you look closer, you'll find that what you can see is a small-town look. In some cases, how big is it?

A collection celebrating the anniversary of the Museum of the City of New York opens this week.

Under the customary metaphor of the term-service series "Peak" — real and green ways to honor the city — the exhibition is set to open around the day the Statue of Liberty opened. The mayor's official residence was one city landmark named in 1867, 1912 and integrating one of the great works of the show.

A unique feature of the "As Above in New York" section of the exhibition will be a media wall projected behind a Sarah Sze installation.

Curators say the show is deliberately intimate, with visitors invited to linger over letters, ledgers and photographs that trace the city's growth from a colonial port into a global capital. "We wanted people to feel the weight of a hundred years," said the museum's director, "without ever feeling lectured to."

A companion catalog, published this month, reproduces more than two hundred of the objects on view, many of them never before exhibited outside the museum's storage vaults. It runs to nearly four hundred pages and includes essays by a dozen historians.

The exhibition remains on view through the spring, after which a selection of works will travel to regional museums across the state. Admission is free on the first Friday of every month, part of a centennial pledge to keep the collection open to all.

For now, the galleries fill each afternoon with schoolchildren, tourists and lifelong New Yorkers alike — all of them, in their own way, taking a trip down Memory Lane.