For more than a century, the only way onto the Wardenclyffe site was a guided tour and a lot of imagination. That changed on July 11, when the Tesla Science Center dedicated the Eugene Sayan Center, a 2,200 square foot preview building and the first structure on the campus ever opened to the general public.
The dedication was folded into the 2026 Nikola Tesla Expo, a five to nine evening event marking Tesla’s 170th birthday alongside America’s 250th anniversary. The Sayan Center will be open Fridays and Saturdays.
What is actually there
Wardenclyffe in Shoreham, New York is the last surviving Tesla laboratory anywhere in the world. The brick building was designed by Stanford White, the architect behind the original Madison Square Garden, and it is the only Tesla structure still standing on its original ground.
The tower itself is long gone. It was dismantled in 1917, and the site went through decades as an industrial property before a crowdfunding campaign in 2012 bought it back. The concrete base of the tower is still in the ground.
The fire
In November 2023 a fire tore through the 10,000 square foot laboratory, destroying the roof, the chimney and the domed cupola. Damage ran past three million dollars. Investigators excluded arson and pointed at contractor blowtorch work during restoration as the likely cause.
That set the whole restoration back years. The Sayan Center broke ground in September 2025 as a way to give visitors something real to walk into while the laboratory itself is still being rebuilt. Calling it a preview center is accurate. It is not the museum. It is proof the museum is coming.
Why the timing matters
There is a neatness to Wardenclyffe opening its doors in the same year that a research team beamed 1,180 watts across 100 meters of open air and a hyperscaler signed for a gigawatt of power generated in orbit.
Tesla lost Wardenclyffe because J.P. Morgan stopped writing checks for a system that could not be metered. The engineering was not the thing that killed it. The business model was. A hundred and twenty-five years later the meter problem is solved, the receivers work, and the money has shown up.
Late, but it showed up.