Higgins Armory

John Woodman Higgins (d. 1961), founder and president of the Worcester Pressed Steel Company, began collecting arms and armor in the 1920s to celebrate steel as a material and to inspire his workers. Architect Joseph D. Leland designed a five-story steel-and-glass building on Barber Avenue in 1929 to display the collection, and the Higgins Armory Museum opened on January 12, 1931. The opening gala featured musicians from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Higgins's sons greeted visitors wearing suits of armor.

At its height the museum held approximately 2,000 objects, including some 24 full suits of armor, and represented the second-largest arms-and-armor collection in the United States after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Higgins endowed the museum with $17,000 at his death in 1961, but in the decades that followed the institution faced steadily worsening funding challenges.

After years of operating deficits, the Higgins Armory Museum closed permanently at the end of 2013. The collection was transferred to the Worcester Art Museum, where a dedicated Higgins gallery opened. The Barber Avenue building was sold in December 2014.

The purchasing entity has since operated the building as a private events venue, where the dramatic steel-and-glass interior continues to serve as a backdrop for weddings, galas, and corporate functions. The structure remains a striking and unusual surviving example of early-twentieth-century industrial-modernist museum architecture in New England.