Entertainment

Delight at the museum

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There’s no bad time to visit museums in this gallery-packed city, but the dead of winter is when they call our name the loudest. And a handful of recent openings offer some new places to visit when you’ve eyeballed the dinosaurs one too many times.

Here’s a rundown on three new exhibits offering a kid-friendly history lesson, the story of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and a rundown on how electricity keeps the subways running.

DiMenna Children’s History Museum

This installation is among the new features the New-York Historical Society unveiled in November, when it reopened after an extensive renovation. Located on the bottom floor of the society’s Central Park West building, it’s “the first children’s history museum in New York and maybe the country,” says spokeswoman Laura Washington.

There’s a reason for that: History is a potentially deadly subject for the graham-cracker set. But that’s not a problem at this lively and engaging museum, where the concept is to hook children not only by offering hands-on exhibits, but also by offering a kids-eye view of history.

So, for example, there’s a section devoted to the “orphan trains” that once shipped homeless city kids out to the Midwest to be taken in by farm families. There’s an interactive game where kids pretend to be “newsies,” selling papers on the street for a penny apiece, as did youths of yore. My 7-year-old daughter, Katie, had to be dragged away from it; same for a game in which kids construct a dream baseball team and see how they’d fare in a matchup with the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers.

Perhaps most sobering to young visitors will be the section devoted to child laborers of the early 20th century, forced to work “for pennies, often amid filth and danger.” It could serve as a useful lesson for those who complain about doing the occasional household chore.

170 Central Park West, at 77th Street. $15 for adults, $5 for kids ages 7 to 13, free for kids under 7; nyhistory.org.

Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at Building 92

The new museum at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center sits far from the nearest subway station, in an industrial stretch at the nexus of Williamsburg, DUMBO and Fort Greene.

Opened in November, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at Building 92 is the latest step in a rebirth of the former shipyard, which languished after the federal government shuttered it in 1966. But in recent years it’s been turned into a thriving industrial park with an emphasis on green business.

Winding over three floors, the permanent exhibit “Brooklyn Navy Yard: Past, Present and Future” relates the story of the yard, which was founded in 1801 as one of the country’s first naval shipyards and grew into an industrial powerhouse that played a leading role in the borough’s growth.

The changes in shipbuilding from 19th-century warships to the battleships of WWII comprise a big part of that tale. But it’s a rich story with a lot of facets, from the role of Wallabout Bay in the Revolutionary War to the epidemics battled at the Naval Hospital to the introduction of female workers during WWII.

Features include a database where visitors can search for info about onetime Navy Yard workers and a collection of oral histories. There’s a fair amount of info about the eclectic mix of tenants that inhabit the new industrial park (including a terrific photo gallery), and if the recounting of the Navy Yard Development Corporation’s success in rebranding the site is self-referential, it’s also a fair part of the story — and a satisfying capper to an interesting tale.

63 Flushing Ave., Brooklyn. Open Wed. to Sun., noon to 6 p.m., admission is free. A free shuttle serves Downtown Brooklyn on weekends; see bldg92.org for info.

ElectriCity: Powering New York’s Rails

This installation — the first new permanent exhibit in a decade at the New York Transit Museum — pays homage to “the invisible energy force that has been humming along miles of track for over 100 years.”

That’s electricity, of course, as anyone who’s ever been warned about the third rail knows. The average straphanger doesn’t give much thought to how it works, though, and this exhibit offers a primer, from where electricity comes from to how it’s distributed through the system and monitored. It offers a good reason for a return visit to this kid-friendly museum — my son Leo, for one, never tires of roaming their collection of vintage trains.

NY Transit Museum, Schermerhorn Street and Boerum Place, Brooklyn. $7 adults, $5 for kids 2 to 17; open Tues. to Fri., 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; mta.info/museum.