The Museum of the City of New York

There are many great art museums in New York.  Yet this one is not like any others – it is dedicated to the history of the city itself, and runs a number of amazing temporary exhibitions on different social, historic and other cultural issues of New York.  It was established in 1923, and has been residing in a beautiful Neo-Georgian building on the 5th Ave and 103rd street, on the Upper East Side, which was designed and completed for the museum in 1930.

Among its top exhibitions, the permanent one called “NY At Its Core” located on the 1st floor is one of the most interesting.  It is focused on the history of the city, from its early days when it was just a newly established Dutch port city in the early 1600s, to the modern post 9/11 days.  And to give you an even better understanding of the city’s 400-year history, there’s a 30-minute narrated film, named “Timescapes” which runs every 40 minutes on the lower floor.  It overviews the history of the city, with the help of numerous drawings, illustrations, maps, and photographs.  The two upper floors are mainly used to run various temporary exhibitions, based on different topics dedicated to New York.

History

The museum was originally located in Gracie Mansion, where available space was limited. One of its first major exhibits was “Old New York”, presented in the Fine Arts Building on West 57th Street in 1926. The success of the project led to a search for a new, permanent headquarters for the museum. A design competition was held between five invited architects, and the Colonial Revival design by Freedlander was selected. The city donated a site on Fifth Avenue, and funds for construction of the museum building were raised by public subscription.The original plans for the museum’s building were scaled back as a result of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, nevertheless, the building was dedicated on January 11, 1932.

On January 24, 1967 the museum building was designated a New York City landmark.

In 1982, the Museum received The Hundred Year Association of New York’s Gold Medal Award “in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York.”

Proposed move

In 2000, the administration of mayor Rudy Giuliani told the museum that it could relocate to the historic Tweed Courthouse near City Hall in Lower Manhattan. El Museo del Barrio would then have moved across the street to occupy the current Museum of the City of New York building. This decision was overturned by the incoming administration of Michael Bloomberg, which decided to use the Courthouse as the headquarters for the new New York City Department of Education, causing MCNY’s then-director Robert R. McDonald to tender his resignation. McDonald was replaced in 2002 by Susan Henshaw Jones, who was at the time the president of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

There was also an attempt to merge the museum with the New-York Historical Society, which did not come to fruition, and the museum was passed over for space at the World Trade Center site.

Expansion

The Museum’s former director, Susan Henshaw Jones, recommitted MCNY to its East Harlem neighborhood by planning an extension to the Museum. The groundbreaking for this extension, which included renovation of existing gallery space, as well as a new pavilion, took place on August 2, 2006, and it was completed in February 2008 with a ribbon cutting later that same year.

The pavilion gallery, designed by the Polshek Partnership, is 3,000-square-foot (280 m2) glass addition, which has two levels for which to display artifacts. The original 1932 Georgian Revival building was also restored during this project, as well as additions including a vault for the museum’s silver collection, a research room and a room for the handling of artifacts. The total costs for the first phase of refurbishments came to $28 million.

In late 2011, the Museum temporarily took over operation of the South Street Seaport Museum which reopened in January 2012