A museum worker climbed behind the steering wheel of a teal-blue city bus, and in place of a windshield, a flat-screen monitor displayed a crowded street in Queens.
Eyes on the screen, the worker swerved around jaywalkers and double-parked trucks while picking up passengers at bus stops. A car suddenly backed up to nab a parking spot. On another block, a food cart blocked traffic.
“I think this gives you so much empathy for bus drivers,” said the worker, Dana Schloss, associate vice president of exhibits at the museum, the New York Hall of Science in Queens.
The stress-inducing bus drive is the first stop in an interactive exhibit called “CityWorks,” opening May 3. It unabashedly celebrates cities by exploring how they were developed and built, and has fun getting hands-on with the complex technology and often messy infrastructure required to provide water, sanitation and transportation to millions of residents.
It is the museum’s largest exhibit in more than a decade and sprawls across 6,000-square feet in its north wing. CityWorks cost $8 million and was designed and built in partnership with the Science Museum of Minnesota.
“The majority of the world’s population lives in cities, and it’s only growing,” said Lisa Gugenheim, the chief executive and president of the New York Hall of Science. “Cities have important stories to tell.”
Coming post-Covid, the exhibit serves as an ode to the resilience of cities. When the pandemic hit five years ago, people fled in droves from New York and other big cities. Stores and restaurants shut. Office workers and tourists stayed away. Traffic disappeared.
Naysayers declared that cities were dead. One online post prompted the comedian Jerry Seinfeld to defend New York. “And it will sure as hell be back,” he wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times.
As predicted, New York is coming back, along with other big cities, though their recovery is still in progress, said John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
More workers have returned to downtown offices, and trains and buses are filling up. Yet, high living costs and a shortage of affordable housing are still pushing many families out.
New York, America’s biggest city, is even growing again after its steep slide during the pandemic, reaching 8.48 million people in July 2024 in the latest census estimates. Among the newcomers are tens of thousands of migrants who have arrived in the city since the spring of 2022. They have helped replenish its diverse neighborhoods.
At the museum, a graphic of a block of apartment buildings is overlaid onto a towering panel that rises up to 16 feet high. Pulling a cord sends rain racing down in blue lights. Pulling again intensifies the shower. The installation demonstrates how rain combines with household wastewater from toilets, showers, dishwashers and washing machines and can overload the sewage system, overflowing into the city’s rivers.
The New York Hall of Science, which started out as an attraction at the 1964 World’s Fair, had its own recent challenges with water. The museum reopened in July 2021 after being closed 16 months during the pandemic, only to be flooded two months later by Hurricane Ida. It did not reopen again until the following year.
Next to the rain display, a replica of a sewer pipe shows all the random detritus that gets stuck down drains or flushed. The result is a slimy blockage called a “fatberg.” Try picking out the cooking grease, car oil, diaper, tampon, hair, floss, wet wipes and plastic bag, a sign next to it says.
There’s a station to build skyscrapers from K’nex rods and connectors and plastic pieces custom-made by the museum. At a recycling display, colored balls representing metal (yellow), glass (blue) and plastic (pink) pieces flow across a conveyor belt to be sorted into tubes.
In another corner, trash bags in three sizes — eight, 10 or 12 pounds — can be thrown into the back of a city garbage truck fashioned from wood and plastic. A 60-pound trash bag is also on display as a test of strength. CityWorks draws on real-life New York City data, from traffic counts and subway ridership to maps of flood areas. The street scenes used in the bus drive were taken by a videographer the museum hired to film with a GoPro camera aboard city buses rolling through Times Square, Corona in Queens and University Heights in the Bronx.
A model of an industrial Brooklyn neighborhood, which can be built from blocks with sensors on an interactive table, was based on data on traffic density, waste generation and flooding risk from Red Hook and the surrounding waterfront to illustrate the impact of development and climate change. There are two other models of neighborhoods in Midtown Manhattan and Queens to play with.
“We really want the exhibit to be a platform for broader conversations,” said Katie Culp, the museum’s chief learning officer.
CityWorks highlights not only the physical city but also the municipal work force that keeps it running. Sprinkled through the exhibit are recordings by New York City workers, including a bus dispatcher, wastewater scientist and subway conductor.
The garbage truck display was designed to show the hard job of a sanitation worker. When it was tested at the museum last summer, some parents were overheard dismissing the career choice.
So a sign was added to the display: “Do you have what it takes to be one of New York’s strongest?”
In no time, the conversation shifted, museum workers said. As parents learned, it takes a lot of skill to be a sanitation worker.
CityWorks will become a permanent exhibit at the science museum, which draws more than 400,000 visitors annually, Ms. Gugenheim said.
“People are drawn to cities,” she said. “The energy, the complexity, the design are all part of what makes cities special.”
Winnie Hu is a Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City.
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