Reopening for Juneteenth, a Museum Celebrating a Black Inventor

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.

Credit…James Barron/The New York Times

Near a video screen on a display wall in a charming, small museum in Queens is a pair of $150 sneakers with a number: 247097. It is the number of a patent issued in 1881.

The shoes light up when someone walks in them for a few steps. As Under Armour noted when it introduced them last year, the sneakers were a tribute to Lewis Latimer.

Who?

Lewis Howard Latimer, the Black draftsman and inventor who, with a collaborator, devised a method of manufacturing carbon filaments for lightbulbs that made it easier to mass produce them.

And who worked for Thomas Edison after working for a rival in the early days of electric lighting.

And who drew the patent diagrams for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone.