Explore the DiMenna Children's History Museum before you visit with our made-for-kids interactive map. Click on each pavilion and discover more about the people you will meet during your visit.

Cornelia Van Varick

Cornelia van Varick was a Dutch girl who lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn, around 1700. A great deal is known about her household and family because when her widowed mother died, executors...

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Alexander Hamilton

A virtual orphan in the Caribbean, Alexander Hamilton used his intelligence and determination to start a new life in New York City. Visitors enter Hamilton’s “study,” and explore...

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Americam Dreamer

This engaging photo gallery combines images of New Yorkers from the past—well-known and obscure—with easily recognized people today. Young visitors can snap...

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James McCune Smith

James McCune Smith, later a brilliant doctor and abolitionist, was a student at the African Free School in 1824. The son of a black woman and an unknown...

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George Washington in New York

New York City was the nation’s first capitol and the site of the first presidential inauguration. Standing near a replica of Federal Hall’s frontage on Wall Street, visitors enter the ...

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Historical viewfinder

Visitors can peer through an engaging viewfinder and see a large digital selection of then-and-now photographs (and some prints)of selected locations in the five boroughs...

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Barbara K. Lipman Children's history library

The library is a large, multipurpose space where students can read on their own, listen to a story in the comfortable class-size...

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Esteban BellÁn

When Esteban Bellán was a young Cuban student at St. John’s College (now Fordham) in the 1860s, he was introduced to the game of baseball...

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Orphan train

Here visitors engage in a pivotal moment in the lives of poor, young, New York orphans who were transported from East Coast cities to new lives, mostly in rural America, beginning...

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Cast your vote

Children discover candidates, voters, buttons, and ballot boxes from the past - and learn about who couldn't vote.

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Newsies

Newsies were poor, often abandoned, sometimes immigrant children who sold newspapers on New York City streets in the19th and early 20th centuries. Visitors meet...

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History detectives

The History Detectives pavilion explores a basic question: How do we know what we know about the past? There are two major parts of the pavilion. One is focused on..

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