Times Square’s RiseNY exhibit brings NYC’s Disneyfication to new low
nypost.comhosted more than its fair share of Instagram museums. But the new immersive experience, RiseNY — an assortment of random cultural artifacts paired with a theme-park ride, and shoehorned into an otherwise drab Midtown storefront — might be the most absurd yet.
Now in previews in Times Square, this $28-per-person tourist trap offers audiences a “three-part journey” through the five boroughs’ history that will purportedly “help the city soar to new heights” as it “rebound[s] from the pandemic in an extraordinary way,” as the press materials for the exhibit say.
In reality, it is a charmless, New York-themed highlight reel of pop art spread across three windowless floors. At the 45th Street exhibit, attendees are immediately greeted with a RiseNY step and repeat before heading upstairs to an imitation City Hall subway entrance, now with wall-to-wall carpeting.
Inside, the station re-creation is actually a theater built to screen an “immersive film” by documentary filmmaker Ric Burns.
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