Open Doors, Open House New York Unlocks 300-Plus Sites This Weekend

Some New York doors open once a year, and this is the weekend.

Open House New York Weekend began this morning, Friday, October 16, and runs through Sunday, October 18. The organizers count more than 300 destinations across all five boroughs. More than half of the festival is fully free and open to the public.

The pitch suits a city that lives after dark. These are rooms you pass every night on the way somewhere else and never get to see.

The New Rooms

OHNY lists 12 sites that are joining for the first time, and the list is strange in the best way.

The Paradise Performing Arts Center is a 4,000-seat theater on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. It was built in 1929 as one of the five Loew's Wonder Theatres, the movie palaces that once made a night at the pictures feel like a night at the opera.

Underground, the MTA is opening up its Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 work in East Harlem, where tunnel excavation and station building are under way. In Bushwick, the landmark 19th-century William Ulmer Brewery shows off its vaulted cellars. And the Flatiron Building at Dusk session is built around a new LED light display on the landmark's ornate facade.

The rest of the new list runs from an office-to-residential conversion at 77 Water Street to a sanitation garage with a green roof, a Times Square tower with an outdoor terrace, a walking tour of the planned Interborough Express light rail route, and 190 Bowery, the gritty downtown landmark that once housed bohemians and is now a modern office open to the public for the first time.

One more new door belongs to Roy Lichtenstein. His West Village studio, which Gothamist reports was donated to the Whitney Museum in 2022, is open for ticketed tours on Friday led by a Whitney art historian. If the studio makes you curious about the work, our story on the Whitney's Lichtenstein survey covers the show uptown from the workroom.

Five Doors Worth Finding

Gothamist's Hannah Frishberg picked five favorites. Three need no ticket at all.

Monumental Labs in Greenpoint is a stone-carving operation where industrial robots and artisans turn raw stone into architectural detail. Visitors walk the production floor while the machines run, on Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.

The Mount Morris Fire Watchtower in Marcus Garvey Park is an 1857 landmark in Harlem with a 5,000-pound bell. It is open Sunday from 1 to 2:30 p.m., and access is limited to 12 people at a time, so expect a line.

At the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, a science open house today, Friday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. takes visitors through the library, the herbarium and the Pfizer Laboratory. It is first come, first served.

The two ticketed picks are the Lichtenstein studio and the QueensWay walking tour, which runs Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to noon in Forest Hills. It covers about a mile of abandoned rail line through Forest Park, led by John Surico, executive director of Friends of the QueensWay.

These are rooms you pass every night on the way somewhere else and never get to see.

Lower Manhattan, By the Clock

The Downtown Alliance published a timetable for the Financial District. Federal Hall National Memorial is free and open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. all three days. The Collector's Office at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House is free on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Hildreth Meière's Art Deco Red Room at Printemps New York is free on Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m.

Ticketed slots downtown cost $7. The Woolworth Building lobby runs tours every half hour on Saturday from 1 to 4:30 p.m. and on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. 20 Exchange Place, a newly renovated Art Deco tower with an outdoor terrace, opens Saturday and Sunday mornings. The Perelman Performing Arts Center has early-evening sessions today and Saturday, at 5 and 6:30 p.m.

Elsewhere, returning favorites include the 610 and 620 Loft and Garden rooftops at Rockefeller Center, the Ford Foundation, the Surrogate's Courthouse, the Colossal Media paint shop and the Con Edison East River Generating Station.

What to Know Before You Go

Tickets for the ticketed tours were released online at noon on October 2. If you missed them, more than 150 venues welcome drop-in visitors with no ticket needed. The full lineup can be sorted by borough, day, accessibility and keyword.

Hours vary by site, and small spaces fill first. The festival has run since 2003 and relies on more than a thousand volunteers. Last year more than 50,000 people took part, from 80 percent of the city's zip codes.

The doors are open until Sunday. After that, the city goes back to keeping its secrets.