New-York Historical

Stand for a moment on the sidewalk and turn your back to the building. Across the avenue, the stone wall of Central Park runs north and south, and the trees lean over it. You can hear buses sighing at the curb, joggers passing, and the wind moving through the branches. Now turn around. In front of you is a long, pale granite front with tall columns. This is New-York Historical, and it has been collecting the story of this city for longer than almost any institution here.

There is a small detail in the name that most visitors never notice. It is written with a hyphen between "New" and "York." That hyphen is not a typo. In the early nineteenth century, many writers spelled the city's name that way. The museum kept the old spelling as a link to its own beginnings. For most of its life, it was called the New-York Historical Society. More recently, it shortened its everyday name, but the hyphen stayed.

The story begins in 1804. New York was then a busy port, but it was still small. A group of citizens, led by a merchant and civic organizer named John Pintard, worried that the young city was losing its records. Letters, maps, newspapers and personal papers were being thrown away or lost to fire. They founded a society to save these things. That makes this the oldest museum in New York City. It is older than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and older than its neighbour to the north.

For its first hundred years, the society moved from building to building around lower Manhattan. Its collections kept growing, and each new home became too small. In the early twentieth century, it finally settled here, on the Upper West Side. The central part of the building you see opened in 1908. It was designed by the architecture firm York and Sawyer. Later, wings were added at both ends, which gave the facade its long, even shape along the avenue.

Look at the design. It follows the classical style that American public buildings often used at the time — columns, symmetry and plain stone surfaces. The message was simple. History was serious, and it deserved a building that looked permanent. Notice how calm the facade is compared with the apartment towers around it. Many of those towers have decorated tops and busy cornices. This building stays quiet and low, and it lets the park across the street take the attention.

Now, a surprise. Inside these walls are the original watercolours that John James Audubon painted for his book, The Birds of America. Audubon was a naturalist and artist in the first half of the nineteenth century. He travelled across the country to paint birds at life size. His prints became famous, but the watercolours came first. After his death, his widow sold the original paintings to the society in the 1860s. Only a small number are shown at any one time, because light damages old paper.

The second surprise surprises many people more. The museum holds a large collection of lamps made by Tiffany Studios — glowing shades of leaded glass shaped like dragonflies, wisteria and flowers. For many years, people believed Louis Comfort Tiffany himself designed them. Research in the early twenty-first century showed that a woman named Clara Driscoll, who led a team of women glass cutters, designed many of the best-known lamps. The gallery is dark, so the coloured glass glows. It is one of the quietest rooms in the building.

Painting is here too. The museum holds an important group of works from the Hudson River School. This was a nineteenth-century American movement of landscape painters, who painted wild valleys, waterfalls and mountain light. One highlight is The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole. It is a series of five large canvases. Together, they show the same imaginary landscape as a civilization rises, grows rich, falls, and finally returns to wilderness. It is a dramatic warning, painted in the young United States.

Not everything is behind glass in a formal gallery. Upstairs, the museum has a space for open storage. Here, thousands of objects sit in tall cases, close together, more like a well-organized attic than a display. You can see furniture, toys, tools, signs, buttons and household objects. It feels personal. These are the things that ordinary New Yorkers used, carried and left behind. Many visitors spend more time here than they planned.

The museum also tells stories that older histories often left out. It has a centre devoted to women's history, which looks at the women who shaped the city and the country. There is also a children's history museum on the lower level. It tells the past through the eyes of young people who lived in New York. If you are travelling with children, this space is designed for them, with hands-on displays.

Behind the galleries is something that many visitors never enter — a large research library. It holds manuscripts, maps, newspapers, photographs and architectural drawings. Historians, writers and students come here to read original documents. This was the founders' first purpose. Before the paintings and the lamps, the society existed to keep paper safe. That old mission still sits at the centre of the building.

Step back onto the sidewalk and look north. The building next door is the American Museum of Natural History. Together, these two institutions make this stretch of Central Park West one of the city's great places for learning. Families move between them all day. In the morning, school groups line up along the stone wall. In the late afternoon, the low sun comes across the park and lights the granite facade from the front.

Before you walk on, take one more look at the columns and the plain stone. More than two centuries ago, a few citizens decided that the everyday papers of a small port city were worth saving. Those papers are still here, along with birds, lamps and paintings. As you walk away, listen to the city around you — the buses, the voices, the footsteps. Someday, some piece of this ordinary afternoon may end up in a building like this one.