06/22/2026
Walk the hillside route that Jacques Marchais and stonemason Joseph Primiano once drove every Sunday, picking fieldstone from across Staten Island for the walls that became the Museum. Trapezoidal windows. Slate-capped doorways. A pagoda roof copied stone for stone from a Lama Temple replica built for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. None of it stood here before Marchais and her husband Harry Klauber bought this hill in 1921, turning a farm within commuting distance of Manhattan into what she called the Potala of the West.
The tour moves from the Library, completed in 1945 and home to nearly two thousand volumes of Tibetan art and literature, to the Museum campus itself, opened to the public on October 5, 1947, and modeled on a chanting hall Marchais studied only through photographs and research. Outside, the Samadhi Garden unfolds across terraces built across the early decades of the 1900s: stone stairways, a fish and lotus pond set into the hillside below the museum, niche-like seating carved from the retaining walls themselves.
Visitors will trace the trapezoidal door and window frames echoing traditional Tibetan architecture, see how uncoursed fieldstone masonry holds its shape without a single quarried block, and stand in the same room where the Dalai Lama stood in 1991.
Museum Admission included.
www.tibetanmuseum.org
