Last week was opening day for the new Gensler-designed Jackie Robinson Museum in Lower Manhattan. Luminaries, including Spike Lee and Mayor Eric Adams were on hand to inaugurate the museum, which was first announced by Major League Baseball and the Jackie Robinson Foundation to observe the 61st anniversary of his Dodgers debut in 2008.

Occupying a space on Varick Street that is now landmarked by the city, the 20,000-square-foot museum focuses as much on Robinson’s multisport athletic career and rise to baseball’s pinnacle as it does on his progressive social activism and lifelong fight against racism. 

Years of delays meant the project has been put off its intended 2019 opening until this year.

Having opened its doors last Friday, the Jackie Robinson Museum seeks to bring people from all walks together to commune and appreciate each other’s humanity and diverse experiences. Enjoy a glimpse of the ribbon cutting ceremony led by Emmy Award winner @RobinRoberts pic.twitter.com/QyNcQVhWpZ
— Jackie Robinson Foundation (@JRFoundation) August 2, 2022

The collection includes 4,500 artifacts from Robinson’s baseball career as well as personal items loaned by the family and a 40,000-photograph archive. In a New York Times preview of the museum last month, Robinson’s son David said: "Some of the things we grew up with now have huge historical significance, and the museum is a place for everyone to see it, and much, much more. It will be a marvel of modern information delivery."

Envisioning an "immersive, media-based museum experience," Gensler planned to include as many high-tech features as they could leverage from past projects such as the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles and the Kaleideum in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

A special feature of some interest is the Ideum-designed 1/64-scale model of the erstwhile Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, which has been brought to life through LED lighting and 3D printing technology combined with a replica scoreboard and two 34-inch-long "Reading Rail" 5K displays developed and fabricated in their Corrales, New Mexico studio.

Elsewhere throughout the museum, exhibition spaces, a 75-seat theater, and other elements aid in the delivery of the museum's educational mission and narrative framing of the life of one of 20th-century America's most powerful social voices.

"We all really immersed ourselves in Jackie's story," Gensler’s experience strategy director Laura Gralnick recently told Travel+Leisure. "One of the things we heard was not to whitewash the story — to really tell Jackie and Rachel [Robinson]'s experience as authentically and true as we possibly could, so people could really understand all the trials and tribulations that went along with everything he did."