One of my favorite museums in NYC is the Museum of the City of New York. It’s not one that most tourists discover, although I suspect many public schools go there on field trips. It’s a little further north on museum mile than the others. It’s small. It doesn’t have a collection of fine art – although it does have a rocking doll house.

I visited once, within the first 10 years that I lived in New York, I think because my roommate at the time wanted to see the dollhouse for some reason. And, for a long time, that’s how I thought about it: as the museum with the dusty dollhouse in the dim room up at the top of the building.

The Mannahatta exhibit changed all that. This museum knows how to put on a really cool exhibition. Mannahatta was a multi-media exhibition looking at the natural history of the island that we now call Manhattan over time. Topography, flora, fauna, waterways. The history of early human populations. All illustrated with a series of color-coded maps, showing the evolution over time. And then they project forward in time – what will the city be like the future?

I bought this book to enjoy that exhibit with me, long after it ended in person at the museum.

Now the museum has an exhibit about four factors impacting New York’s development: money, density, diversity, and creativity. Starting with the Lenape, digital maps show the density of population. Then it skips forward to the first Dutch settlers, and the map shows where they settled and in what density, the different industries or agricultural foci that they used to make money, what their religions were. And it keeps skipping forward, a few decades at a time, charting the arrival of the English, of slaves, of Jewish people, of Muslims, of the Chinese. The evolution from shipping and agriculture, to manufacturing and craft. The footpaths of the Lenape to the roads of the Dutch to railways and ferries and highways.

Opposite those evolving digital maps, another media wall shows early streetscapes of New York, fading into the same locations in modern times. The sides of the rooms (the exhibit spans two huge rooms), feature souvenirs from each era; the center of the room is staggered with interactive kiosks where you can call up stories about women, pirates, and other subgroups within historical New York.

I’ve been to see this exhibit twice – and wore out a friend and my husband who needed to digest history in smaller bites. The last time I was there, I discovered another exhibit on the history of New York in film, which looked totally awesome but I couldn’t stay to see it because my companion had had enough and dragged me away, out the front doors into the park.

If you’re going to go the Museum of the City of New York, plan accordingly. Go alone – unless you know someone who matches you in stamina – and plan to be there all day, absorbing information. Or maybe, if you’re doing a staycation, plan to consume it in daily bites.

Or you can buy the huge book, like I did with Mannahatta, and dive into it a little bit at a time at home.