For the past three years, residents in a Brooklyn neighborhood have had their own window front collection of New York City artifacts. That collection is growing, and is on the move. NY1’s Roger Clark filed this report.

Abraham Lincoln has been immortalized in many ways, but this is probably the only life-size felt sculpture you will ever see of him. It took artist Pedro Genao almost a full presidential term to make it. Honest.

“The whole project is for three years, little by little,” says Genao. “But I make it little by little, it's not three years straight. I put it together in like 300 hours."

You can see it in the window of the City Reliquary in Williamsburg. This is a new location for the storefront collection of oddities and relics from New York City history, which doubles as a center for civic information.

Founder Dave Herman has moved it from Grand and Havermeyer to a larger space on Metropolitan Avenue. It's made up of his own items, along with the collections of neighbors and friends, like a sandwich pick from the now closed Second Avenue Deli, and an entire binder full of Statue of Liberty postcards.

“New York City's history is out on the curb or buried in people's basements," says Herman.

The windows of the City Reliquary have been a familiar sight in Williamsburg for the past three years, but you couldn't actually go inside. But at the new place, you can go inside, because it is going to be a museum.

That doesn't mean the window aspect of the Reliquary will disappear. One case in point is artist Christy Gast’s collection of plates featuring female presidential candidates, like the first African-American woman to run for president, Charlene Mitchell, a Communist Party hopeful in 1968.

“These people have really interesting histories but they are largely unknown," says Gast.

The bigger question, at least for some people, is why anyone would collect this stuff, or want to come see it.

“We more often get intrigue and interest and nostalgia and sort of a genuine love for the place, which is surprising. We scare the cynics off," says Bill Scanga of the City Reliquary.

The new Reliquary Museum opens April 1st. If you want to find out more, visit www.cityreliquary.org.

Tell them Abe sent you.

- Roger Clark