Five of the best Lower Manhattan museums

The best Lower Manhattan Museums include the National Museum of the American Indian, the Fraunces Tavern Museum and the Skyscraper Museum

This guide to the best museums in Lower Manhattan is part of a special New York City collection created to celebrate the new direct flights from Sydney to New York. To find many more great things to do in New York City, head this way.

Lower Manhattan is the most historic section of New York City, so it’s fitting that several good museums congregate there. These picks are five of the best museums in Lower Manhattan.

Best Lower Manhattan museums: The National 9/11 Memorial and Museum

The National 9/11 Memorial and Museum on the site of the former World Trade Center is both hugely moving and very tastefully done. Two giant cascading pools take the place of the twin towers, while the museum goes through the events of September 11th, 2001 in forensic detail.

The use of video and audio eyewitness accounts, in particular, brings a lump to the throat.

Top museums in Lower Manhattan: The National Museum of the American Indian

An often-forgotten outlet of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of the American Indian occupies the former Custom House in Lower Manhattan. It does a curiously poor job of telling native American history, but the collection of artefacts that have been gathered are astounding. There are huge spears from the Yamana tribe in Tierra del Fuego, tailored Apache shirts made out of deer hide, Paiute fish traps and effigy figures from Peru.

Most of the 800,000-strong collection came courtesy of George Gustav Heye, a New Yorker who quit Wall Street to indulge his passion for indigenous Americana.

Lower Manhattan museum recommendations: The Fraunces Tavern Museum

In the late 18^th century, the Fraunces Tavern was a relatively classy establishment – it even housed the Departments of Treasury, War and Foreign affairs for a few years before New York lost its status as national capital.

You can still eat and drink there, but upstairs it has been turned into a very idiosyncratic museum. The Fraunces Tavern Museum delves into tavern life of the revolutionary era, but mainly indulges in its George Washington obsession.

Washington gave a speech to his officers here before resigning his commission and going back to civilian life. There’s all manner of posters and portraiture, plus the rather more weird lock of hair and church pew fragment.

Top Lower Manhattan museums: The Skyscraper Museum

If it’s skyscrapers you want to see, then you just have to step outside and ogle the Manhattan skyline. But the ironically compact Skyscraper Museum goes into the stories behind the big beasts, and their evolution over the years.

Scale models of some of the shiny new glass towers being built around the world are on display, but it’s the race to be tallest in New York that really grips.

The top tale is of the rivalry between 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building. The owners of the latter waited until the rival was finished before putting up an extending spire that secured the title of world’s tallest building.

Best museums in Lower Manhattan: The Museum of American Finance

In the middle of Wall Street, the Museum of American Finance looks at how the money goes round, and for the non-economist includes some well explained but dull sections about bond ratings and commodity futures. Far more interesting is the dive into the history of the US – and global – financial system.

Particularly fascinating is the story of Alexander Hamilton who basically set it all up, gave away New York being the nation’s capital in return for the states backing his plans, then got killed in a duel with the Vice President.

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