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Walking down Mulberry Street in New York’s Little Italy can often feel like a contact sport. Locals elbow past tourists, pedestrians duck and dodge al fresco dining tables, gift shops all but assault you with racks of kitschy souvenirs. Heaven help you during the annual San Gennaro Festival.

Photo © Sahar Coston-Hardy/Esto

When you reach the intersection of Mulberry and Grand Streets, however, you encounter the Grand Mulberry, a seven-story residential building designed by Morris Adjmi Architects with its distinctive facade of custom-formed dome bricks. On the Mulberry side of the building, set back from the sidewalk, is a triangle of refuge from the neighborhood hubbub that serves as the threshold of the new Italian American Museum.

Photos © Michael Vahrenwald/Esto

In October, the 24-year-old institution opened its op.Architecture + Landscape (op.AL)–designed space inside the Grand Mulberry. With its 6,500 square feet and four levels, two of them subterranean, it’s unlike anything else in Little Italy and an undeniable upgrade from the museum’s previous digs. From 2006–2017, the museum was a Little Italy mainstay, but its improvisational nature gave it a scrappy, somewhat transient feel. It occupied a former bank and barber shop on the ground floors of two adjoining buildings on the site of what is now the Grand Mulberry. When they were torn down for that redevelopment, leadership had an opportunity to build a more spacious, permanent home.

Photo © Michael Vahrenwald/Esto

“We approached the project from the perspective of bringing the museum to a space of modernity,” says Jonathan A. Scelsa, founding partner of Brooklyn-based op.AL. “We were interested in giving them a very clean and contemporary backdrop where the art and historic artifacts could speak for themselves.”

The two basement levels will host permanent exhibitions dedicated to Italian American history from the 19th to 21st centuries, with a flexible 48-seat auditorium on the second subfloor. (These galleries won’t be fully installed and accessible to the public until June 2025.) The museum’s ground-level serves as the reception area and atrium, with a long wall that can be used as display space and an open stair leading to the special exhibits gallery above that is currently open to the public. Connecting these spaces is a conical light well that accentuates the verticality of the museum while bringing natural and artificial light into the below-ground galleries.

Photo © Michael Vahrenwald/Esto

But the show starts on the sidewalk. The first encounter with the museum is a double-height storefront clad in perforated steel that’s tilted inward from the street offers a sleek contrast to Adjmi’s equally distinct red-brick facade. A large arched window to the left of the entrance is oriented toward the intersection of Mulberry and Grand, giving visitors and passersby a way to connect with and consider the historic heart of Little Italy before and after entering the museum. This approach, present in the earliest stages of design, was all about creating a sense of arrival, and, Scelsa says, it was one enthusiastically embraced by Adjmi and the institution.

“The museum team wanted to make a statement and were excited about maintaining its adjacency to the district while ensuring the project gave them a presence, both on the exterior in terms of how to grab attention but also in a way that it celebrated the spatial experience as much as the artwork,” Scelsa says. “I think it’s also a stewardship, where the museum is somewhat giving space back to the public.”

Photos © Sahar Coston-Hardy/Esto

While programming won’t be fully online until the spring, its new space has already achieved some of what museum leadership—and architect—hoped. People hustling down Mulberry slow down and gawk, taking a step or two off the sidewalk into the triangle created by the facade to consider the unexpected gray steel popping out of the larger building’s nubby brickwork; the plaster statue of a seated seamstress holding an invisible thread in the arched window; the white atrium wall and red reception area just beyond the front doors. Some enter to ask what this place is and resolve to return when everything is installed; a few stay to see the small army of historic, four-foot-tall Sicilian marionettes created by the Manteo family on view in the upstairs gallery.

Or they may just stop under the museum’s entry canopy, catch their breath, and let the experience of Little Italy wash over them—enjoying a moment of respite among the neighborhood’s lively carnival atmosphere.