Celebrate 100 years of NYC pop culture, from ‘Sex and the City’ to ‘Sesame Street’
“Sex and the City” glam, “Sesame Street” glee and “Taxi Driver,” all housed under one roof.
Only in New York!
The Museum of the City of New York, which is celebrating its centennial anniversary, explores the city’s pop culture over the past century in its new exhibit, “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture.”
Opening Friday, more than 400 objects from TV, film, music, theater, literature and fashion — capturing creative energy inspired by the Big Apple — will be on display in the all-encompassing exhibit.
“It feels like pure New York — energetic, fun, challenging and full of contradictions,” Sarah Henry, the Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe chief curator and interim director at the MCNY, told The Post.
Just as diverse as our grand city, there’s “truly something for everyone” to marvel at: the green 123 Sesame Street lamppost, the diamond Furby necklace Adam Sandler held in “Uncut Gems,” Robert De Niro’s robe from “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver” storyboards drawn by Martin Scorsese.
Fashion is woven through the exhibit, including the white tutu Sarah Jessica Parker wore in “Sex and the City,” a 1952 photo from Look magazine of a “woman walking by Bergdorf Goodman,” a gold lamé gown from the television series “Pose” and Berenice Abbott’s 1938 photo “Tempo of the City I,” showing stylish denizens as they hustle and bustle.
NYC-based designer Zang Toi’s dramatic hand-beaded Manhattan skyline cape, which caught the museum’s attention after being featured last year in The Post, encapsulates how artists show their love for the Big Apple.
As a Parsons School of Design graduate who emigrated from Malaysia with a few bucks in his pocket, hoping to make his dreams come true, the designer, now successful for more than 30 years, says the cape is a “tribute to my beloved adopted home, New York City.”
After all, as the legendary Frank Sinatra said, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”
Old Blue Eyes’ pipes are just one of the voices in the “Songs of New York” section, an interactive display that plays famous tunes from the five boroughs, with artists ranging from Jennifer Lopez to Wu-Tang Clan to the Ramones.
One area is a feast for the eyes and ears, with 400 film clips — everything from classics like “Rear Window,” “King Kong” and Gloria Swanson-fronted silent film “Manhandled,” to cult movies like “Paris Is Burning,” to modern-day masterpieces like Oscar-winning “Black Swan” — showing the glam and the grit of NYC on 16 screens in a panoramic space.
It’s part of the museum where you might find yourself lost for hours, movie buff or not.
A section of the exhibit is dedicated to the trials and tribulations of the MTA, while another showcases the many hot spots New Yorkers love, like nightclubs, parks, restaurants and, yes, iconic places we love to hate like Times Square.
Yet another part shows what it’s like to actually be a resident, as told through pop culture, from “Eloise” books to “The Jeffersons.”
Even local celebs like Pizza Rat make a cameo.
The carefully selected objects “show the incredible, changing diversity of this dynamic city, but also the way that certain enduring themes continue to captivate observers — whether it’s the perpetual struggle of trying to get a seat on the subway or the charm of an escape to a rooftop,” said Henry.
When asked what her favorite object is, she said: “That’s like asking favorite neighborhood in New York — the multiplicity, variety and the contradictions are the whole point!”
No easy feat, as it took museum curators more than five years to conceive, compile and curate the exhibit, which runs through June 2024.
“We think everyone will come away with new ways of looking at the city — what makes it tick, what shapes our feelings about it,” Henry said.
“This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” runs May 26 through June 21, 2024, at the Museum of the City of New York at 1220 Fifth Ave. $20 admission.
