On Cortlandt Alley in Lower Manhattan, a museum fills the shaft of an old freight elevator. Mmuseumm opened there in 2012. Curator Alex Kalman founded it with filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, and it puts ordinary present-day objects behind glass as if they were artifacts from a distant century. A space that size makes you wonder why tiny museums exist at all. The better puzzle may be why we expect museums to be big in the first place.
Tiny museums are the rule, not the exception
Ask someone to picture a museum and they’ll probably describe the marble version: a sweeping staircase, a line at the ticket desk, a gift shop with its own floor plan. That image leaves out most of the field. According to the American Association for State and Local History, or AASLH, the majority of museums in the United States are considered small.
The association’s small museums committee put numbers to the idea in 2007. Its working definition describes an annual budget below $250,000, a staff small enough that each person covers several jobs, and volunteers who fill key roles. The association also offers a gentler test, and it may be the more accurate one: “If you think you’re small, you’re small.”
Seen that way, a museum in an elevator shaft is an unusual address more than an unusual idea.
The collection usually comes before the building
Plenty of small museums begin with a heap of objects and only later acquire a mission statement. In La Crosse, Kansas, the barbed wire museum started as a modest display, according to a 2025 KMUW report, put together when local businessmen wanted something distinctive to bring visitors to town. Those first 30 or so pieces have since become more than 2,700.
Barbed wire seems a strange thing to gather by the thousands until you consider how much rural land it divided. Each variety records someone’s attempt to solve the same problem a little differently. The La Crosse story follows a pattern that shows up again and again in local institutions: a civic hope, a few determined collectors, and the slow accumulation that turns a display case into a museum.
Specialist communities keep the doors open
A single-subject museum becomes a gathering point for the people who know that subject best. The KMUW report notes, almost as an aside, that barbed wire enthusiasts have a second museum to weigh against the first: the Devil’s Rope Museum in McLean, Texas. Rivalries like that need a real community to divide. They also hint that these collections answer to experts as much as to passing tourists.
That may be the quieter reason small museums endure. Their audience is narrow but devoted. If the AASLH definition holds, many of these places run on volunteers in key roles, so the knowledge of collectors and longtime helpers carries weight that a payroll might carry elsewhere.
Visiting takes a little homework
The things that make small museums personal also make them hard to predict. When a handful of people cover every job, the open sign depends on who is free that day, and schedules printed in guidebooks or on map apps can lag behind. KMUW’s June 2025 report included hours for the La Crosse museum. More than a year on, treat a schedule like that as a starting point rather than a promise.
- Check the museum’s own website or social account the week you plan to go, and note the date on any listing you find.
- Call ahead when possible. Whoever picks up will know more than a search result.
- Ask about steps, space, and seating in advance. Converted rooms and older buildings don’t always have level entrances.
- Some places run on a donation box rather than a ticket desk, so bring a little cash.
A locked door at a small museum can look like neglect. More often it marks an absence: the one person who can tell you where each object came from is somewhere else that afternoon. At this scale, a museum is mostly its people and its things, and the building is simply where they happen to meet.
