Every January, during five short days, the organizers of the Winter Antiques Show transform the Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory from a raw space into the city’s most glamorous and expensive shopping bazaar. The show, which opens to the public tomorrow and benefits the East Side House Settlement, offers everything from American furniture to Chinese porcelain, from Old Master drawings to arms and armor.

Since last January, the Armory itself has undergone changes. It is now under the management of the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy, and the Conservancy has made several improvements, including relighting the lobby and putting in new, much tidier bathrooms downstairs. (In the past, Park Avenue ladies who needed to relieve themselves between purchases confronted bathrooms that were more out-of-date than an English country decorating scheme.)

The show’s executive director, Catherine Sweeney Singer, said that working with the Conservancy’s staff has made her job easier. “I no longer have to personally clear Lexington Avenue of cars to get the trucks in” through the doors of the Drill Hall, she said. “Also, there’s heat in the show office.”

As a trained art historian, she is also happy to see the building and its interiors being cared for. The Armory was built between 1877 and 1881, and its rooms were designed by leaders of the Aesthetic Movement, such as Stanford White, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and the Herter Brothers.

“To see these historic rooms allowed to fall apart when any museum in the country would die to have them” was painful, Ms. Singer said. Alluding to the Antiques Show’s 54-year history in the Armory, she added, “It’s nice to see we may be able to have the show here for another 54 years.”

By Tuesday afternoon, the dealers had all loaded in, though many were still unpacking and arranging their booths. One paintings dealer examined a couple of new nicks in a gilt frame. Another dealer begged not to be photographed as he vacuumed around the base of a sculptural piece. Joking about the potential photo caption, he said: “‘Renowned ethnographer takes patina off important piece of tribal art…'”

The Winter Show always has a loan exhibition, which this year is from the Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham. On Tuesday, the museum’s executive director, Sharon Duane Koomler, was arranging the display inside the booth, whose design was inspired by the architecture of the famous Shaker Meetinghouse at Mount Lebanon. The exhibition includes oval boxes — which Ms. Koomler called “the Tupperware of the day” — case furniture, and chairs, among them rare examples of children’s high chairs, which were manufactured for sale to the outside world. (The Shakers were celibate.) There are examples of other commercial products, from boxes of “Shakers’ Garden Seeds” to medicines such as the “Shaker Asthma Cure” and “Shaker Witch Hazel.”

As for the objects for sale at the show, there are pieces for all tastes. Kentshire Galleries has a pair of 18th-century ivory and penwork chairs from Visakhapatnam, a city in British India where there was a large market for English-style furniture. For those with a more modern sensibility, the dealer Geoffrey Diner has an elegant George Nakashima sideboard and a mirrored Fontana Arte coffee table from the 1950s.

The big-ticket item is a piece of New York history just slightly older than the Armory itself. Offered by the Alexander Gallery, it is an album called “Illustrated Verses: New York 1865,” which is filled with handwritten poems, drawings, and paintings by some of the period’s most eminent artists and writers, including William Cullen Bryant, Frederic Church, Theodore Winthrop, Eastman Johnson, and John Frederick Kensett. The price is a hefty $5 million. A director of the gallery, Laurel Acevedo, said she hopes that the album will be acquired by the Morgan Library & Museum.

Based on the list of contributors, Ms. Acevedo believes that the album was most likely organized by the publisher George Putnam. It was first exhibited at the Sheltering Arms bazaar — a kind of 19th-century Winter Antiques Show, which raised money for Episcopal charities — and later at what the New York Times, in a contemporary account, described as “a private residence in the Second-avenue.” Ms. Acevedo believes that this was most likely the Stuyvesant building, an early apartment building where Putnam and Church both lived, and which was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, who would later do the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

According to the Times, in June of 1870 the album was to be auctioned at Leavitt & Co., to benefit the Women’s Hospital. (There is no record of whether the auction actually took place or of the results.) Of the sale, the Times noted:

“It is seldom so desirable an opportunity occurs at once to aid an excellent benevolent object, and secure an unique artistic prize.”

Perhaps next year the Winter Show’s organizers should consider printing this on tickets, to encourage their clients to buy, buy, buy.

Through January 27 (Park Avenue at 67th Street, 718-292-7392).