It’s snowing today in New York City, as I imagine it is in other parts of the country as well. Right now I’m curled up on my couch, enjoying the little Christmas tree that my roommate and I bought and decorated yesterday (mmm, I love the evergreen smell!).

I’m particularly enjoying the warmth and coziness because early this morning I braved the snow to trek over to the Lower East Side to check out the grand reopening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Just how early, you ask. Early enough to still be dark by the time I arrived, at about 6:30am. What? The museum’s reopening is being celebrated by being open for 30 continuous free hours. By the time I went online on Wednesday to reserve my free ticket, the only time slots left in those whole 30 hours were 5:30am, 6:00am and 6:30am. Ridiculous, you might say. But not too unusual for this city.

So I woke up in the darkness, trekked to the train station through the falling snow, rode the train over the Manhattan Bridge with mostly Chinese men heading to Chinatown to open their market stands, and walked alone along Houston Street to the Bowery.

You would be surprised at the number of people willing to brave early morning snow to look at contemporary art before the sun has even risen, but the museum was buzzing. There were a number of exhibitions, but the main one was Unmonumental, which “explores the reinvention of sculptural assemblage. Using found, fragmented, and discarded materials, the works of the artists on view make a case for modesty, informality, and improvisation.” Good stuff.

Part of the attraction, of course, was checking out the brand new building, designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. The New Museum was originally established 30 years ago in SoHo to display cutting-edge art. But with time came the gentrification of SoHo and the neighborhood’s edge has been sold out to H&M and Banana Republic.

In 2002, the New Museum bought a lot on the Bowery, still “one of the grittiest streets in Manhattan.” According to Peter Goldberger’s article in the New Yorker, Bowery Dreams, “The site, a former parking lot at the intersection with Prince Street, was framed by blocks of restaurant-supply stores, whose owners seemed to be the only property holders on the Lower East Side who showed no interest in selling out to condominium developers.” (The site is not too far from last year’s 11 Spring Street project by the Wooster Collective. In fact, I have distinct memories of checking out the construction site while waiting in line for endless hours to get into 11 Spring Street.) The new building looks like a series of blocks stacked unevenly upon one another, and certainly stands out from its surroundings.

I wasn’t able to take photos inside the museum, but I did manage to take some from the museum’s 7th floor balcony, which towers over the rest of the LES and yielded lovely picture of the snowy city. Not to mention a few of the building itself as I was heading home. I highly recommend checking them out here!