How It Works

We’ve created a series of do-it-yourself Lego instruction manuals, each representing a famous Bay Ridge landmark! Our first instruction manual, for the Bay Ridge Library, is $5 to download from Rebrickable, and we’ll be releasing additional paid and free designs in the coming months, which will appear on this webpage.

Once you have downloaded the instructions, the only thing left to do is get the parts! There’s a vibrant community of Lego fans who sell bricks online. We recommend BrickLink, which has given us the cheapest results the most often, and has a great automatic shopping cart system that gets the cheapest results across multiple stores. We include downloadable .bsx (Brickstore) files on this webpage that you can import in BrickLink to easily create a custom wishlist!

Other alternatives to buying bricks include Rebrickable’s built in ordering feature, or BrickOwl. It’s up to you! We give you the instructions, and you just need to find the pieces. Heck, if you have a bunch of parts in your own home, you can probably put together your own versions based on our instructions.

Are These Official LEGO kits?

Nope! These are our own custom designs. They are known as MOCS: an affectionate term in the Lego community for “My Own Creation”, unofficial designs that are shared and distributed for others to build and play with.

All of our designs are based in-part around the existing Lego Architecture sets, which are built to “micro” scale, i.e. smaller than the normal minifig size. Don’t expect a Lego minifigure to be able to interact with our designs: they are on a much smaller scale, both to reduce the overall price of the parts, and to help us fit big designs into small spaces.

Design #1: The Bay Ridge Library

Our Bay Ridge Library set is a small, handheld representation of the gorgeous 1960 Brooklyn Public Library building on the corner of 73rd St. and Ridge Boulevard. The library is part of a legacy of community-run learning institutions going back to the Bay Ridge Free Library, which was founded in 1888 within the Bay Ridge Athenaeum. The current building is a sleek modernist structure made out of brick, glass, and terracotta. It remains one of the busiest branch libraries in Brooklyn!

The instruction manual includes a ton of historical photos and facts about the design and history of the library building, so you can learn as you build.

Note: All Proceeds for this instruction manual will go toward a yearly donation to the Brooklyn Public Library!

All our Lego designs are by Radio Free Bay Ridge producer, Daniel Hetteix, who is a huge nerd. If you end up building a kit, please share a photo of it and tag our Twitter, Facebook or Instagram accounts!