✨ST 0199: Everything is Becoming a Museum

When we opened our first Rally space on Lafayette Street in 2018, we weren’t trying to reinvent retail. We were just responding to something we kept hearing over and over again...

At every event, whenever we brought out one of the items on the platform in real life, whether it was a fragment of a dinosaur, a vintage Porsche, a baseball card - ANYTHING important - someone would stare, pause for a moment, and say the same words: “This belongs in a museum.”

It was kind of a passing joke in the moment most times, but it revealed something deeper: What people were really identifying with wasn’t just the object’s rarity, but the way it made them feel in the room.

There was a weight to the experience. A sense that commerce alone wasn’t enough to contain it. Whether or not these pieces of history were ever meant to become an “asset class” is a debate that will last forever (no comment on that one for now)… but one thing that isn’t really up for debate is that these things were definitely NOT meant to be passed across a counter like a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

They deserve reverence. Atmosphere. Context.

So soon after we launched our first five asset classes on Rally, we built our own version of that.

250 Lafayette Street became less a store and more a stage. Objects were displayed, not stocked. Outside of small limited merch collections, nothing was ever even really “for sale.”

People wandered, lingered, stared, asked questions. A quick pop in would turn to 30 minutes or an hour just walking in circles in awe. Ownership was still part of the equation, but it was secondary to the feeling of being in the presence of something that carried history.

We changed the layout of the space often, but the theme that stuck was titled “This Belongs in a Museum” - a nod to those earliest conversations about the items in which we were facilitating community ownership.

In hindsight, we were just an early expression of a shift that would spread across New York in the years to follow: the quiet transformation of everyday spaces into museums.

The Museumification of Third Spaces

New York has always thrived on its “third places” - those places that exist somewhere between home and work. Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term, defined them as essential for community: places where you could gather, talk, and maybe most importantly, belong. For decades, those third spaces were diners, bars, churches, barber shops.

In recent history, they’ve been coffee shops, bookstores, boutique gyms.

But in the last decade, and especially in the years after COVID, those spaces have begun to evolve again. The functional was no longer enough. People weren’t just looking for a caffeine fix, or a treadmill, or a place to sit with their laptop. They were looking for places that carried meaning, that felt curated, that offered a sense of permanence in a world defined by constant churn.

So the third space became a museum.

Not literally - though in some cases the lines are definitely blurred. These places don’t charge admission or hand you an audio guide. But they curate their interiors with the same intent as a gallery. Every piece chosen to trigger a memory, every corner arranged to tell a story. They borrow the aura of artifacts, not just for beauty but for gravity.

Cafés as Time Machines

Café Sabarsky on the Upper East Side is an interesting case for Museumification. Technically it’s just a cafe, the ground-floor amenity of the Neue Galerie. But step inside and it’s clear you’re in something closer to an installation. The room is designed to recreate a Viennese coffeehouse circa 1900: wood-paneled walls, bentwood chairs, Josef Hoffmann lighting, a Bösendorfer grand piano tucked in the corner. You don’t just drink coffee there; you time travel. The sachertorte is sweet, but the atmosphere is sweeter (sorry for putting that corny line in btw, but it was a layup).

Or head to Manjul in Soho. On paper, it’s a café. In practice, it feels like a curated exhibit. A tree grows in the center of the room, the architecture bending around it, light arranged to cast shadows that change throughout the day. You’re not there to scroll your phone. Their clothing line, sustainably sourced from Europe and aesthetically tied to their Ukranian roots, is draped on heavy branded hangers in a separate but equally inviting back room, partitioned by oak panels. You’re there to participate in an atmosphere. Coffee is incidental. The room itself is the artifact.

Even the most commercial spaces have joined in. Macy’s Herald Square, a department store that has been selling whats “new” for more than a century, has inadvertently become a museum of the old. Its wooden escalators, among the last functioning in the world, creak under the weight of history. Tourists ride them not because they’re efficient (they aren’t) but because they’re artifacts.

In a place built on novelty, the thing that endures is what draws the most reverence.

The Lobby as Gallery

Perhaps the most dramatic transformation has been in corporate lobbies. Once designed as nothing more than security gauntlets (standard “we-make-loads-of-money-but-don’t-care-about-aesthetics” marble floors, reception desks, turnstiles) have become showcases. They no longer exist just to funnel workers to elevators. They exist to project identity, to act as civic gestures, and to announce that the building, and by extension the company within it, belongs to the cultural fabric of the city.

Walk into Goldman Sachs’ headquarters at 200 West Street and you’re greeted not by signage or branding, but by Julie Mehretu’s Mural. It’s a colossal, 80-foot-wide commission that swallows the lobby in abstraction, layering maps of global cities, architectural fragments, and gestural marks that evoke the frenetic energy of capital itself. It cost $5 million, but its value lies in something more than price. Finance Bros don’t want Finance Culture. It transforms the lobby into a gallery that every passerby can see from half a mile away, turning an entrance into an encounter.

At 550 Madison Avenue, once the fortress-like home of AT&T, the rebirth of the building was marked by Alicja Kwade’s Solid Sky: a 20,000-pound sphere of lapis lazuli suspended in the atrium. The weight alone is staggering, but the effect creates its own world. Where once the lobby was a pass-through, now it’s a destination.

Even at One World Trade Center, which has dedicated whole floors to artist-in-residence studios currently housed by a plethora of both known and lesser-known artists specializing in multiple mediums, José Parlá’s Union of the Senses stretches ninety feet across the entry. It’s graffiti writ monumental, visible to thousands of commuters every morning. It reminds you, before you even step into an office, that you should be part of something bigger than commerce.

These open, often public, spaces are no longer empty vessels. They are curated by the creatively curious and built on the logic of museums: to make the ordinary feel extraordinary, to give concrete permanence to what might otherwise be fleeting.

The Auction House as Public Square

Sotheby’s, which has always blurred lines between commerce and history, has taken the trend even further. Its uptown headquarters functions like a rotating museum, opening its exhibitions to the public for free. Walk in off the street and you can find yourself face-to-face with a Basquiat, a Caravaggio, an original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation or a dinosaur skeleton. You can also browse their wine store which houses everything from a $32 Chateau de Fonbel all the way up to one-of-few selections that often headline auctions. The point is not just to sell, but to “stage” - to create a cultural destination in its own right.

The magic is that it’s not at all pretentious. Walking through the revolving door in the shadow of a giant “Sotheby’s” logo and black-suited security officers has a bit of an intimidation factor, but once inside the vibe is much more laid back.

It’s a profound inversion. For centuries, museums borrowed from private collections to build their public identity. Now private houses borrow from the aura of museums to build their commercial one.

Why Beauty Matters Again

All of this - the cafés, the escalators, the lobbies, the auction houses, the Rally museums that we worked extremely hard to launch and welcome the community into… it all points toward a larger truth: beauty matters again.

For years, design seemed to trend toward minimalism, efficiency, and disposability (the subject of last week’s newsletter and anti-everything rant). Everything was smooth, clean, and frictionless. But friction is where memory lives. Nostalgia thrives in imperfection. The creak of wood, the shimmer of lapis, the weight of a mural… All of it reminds us that permanence is still possible.

In a digital economy, permanence has become the rarest commodity.

Screens refresh endlessly. Trends cycle in and out by the week. Even the news disappears before it has a chance to register. Against that backdrop, the spaces that endure are the ones that dare to act like museums. They curate, they preserve, they immerse. They make us pause.

That’s why third spaces are being remade into galleries. It isn’t a luxury. It’s survival. A café without atmosphere is just a caffeine stop. An office without art is just a cubicle farm on Work Island. A shop without history is just another algorithmic storefront. What makes people return is the feeling that they are part of something larger. Something that might just outlast them.

From Lafayette to Everywhere

Looking back, our little Lafayette experiment feels like an early chapter in a much bigger story. When people told us our objects belonged in a museum, they weren’t asking for velvet ropes or guided tours. They were asking for reverence. They wanted someone to take the items they considered beautiful seriously, and to frame it in a way that gave it meaning.

Seven years later, the city has answered that call. Cafés that double as time machines. Office plazas that double as galleries. Retail stores that double as monuments. Everywhere you go, New York is turning itself inside out, becoming a living museum.

And maybe that’s the most hopeful thing about it. In an age where so much feels disposable, the city is telling us that not everything has to be. That beauty still matters. That nostalgia still matters. That permanence still matters.

Everything is becoming a museum - the majority of which is entirely free of charge. And for the first time in a long time, that feels like progress.

Until next week… enjoy the extended weekend