Collection Highlights and New York and the American Experience

Mounted on the building’s original 1904 columns are grand digital screens displaying a continuous, thematically co-ordinated slide show of treasures from the New-York Historical Society’s collections. The west face of the columns features individual stations, incorporating interactive touch screens and museum artifacts, presenting six themes in American history which are found interwoven with the history of New York. Currently, the columns display a series of portraits featuring the model Editta Sherman, which were part of Bill Cunningham's Facades project. The series was shown here at the New-York Historical Society in 1976, in an exhibit entitled Fashions and Façades, under the guidance of curator Mary Black. Projected on dramatic flat screens affixed to six structural columns, the array of objects and images functions as visual signage that demonstrates to our visitors the depth of New-York Historical's collections. Visitors can access images and information about our App.

Funding for the columns provided by Bloomberg

Liberty/Liberté by Fred Wilson

Upon entering the New-York Historical Society, the visitor encounters Fred Wilson’s Liberty/ Liberté, an installation that offers the viewer access to the multiple layers of interpretation of the history and historical figures of the Age of Revolution.

New York Rising

The showpiece of the space occupies a forty-two-foot wall facing Central Park West, and illustrates New York’s critical contribution to the founding of the United States. Covering the period from the American Revolution through to the New-York Historical Society’s 1804 founding, a contemporary interpretation of a nineteenth-century salon-style display uses some of New-York Historical’s most treasured objects and cutting-edge technology to convey the historical narrative.

Out of the ashes of the British occupation of New York and Evacuation Day in November 1783 at the American Revolution’s end, New York emerged as the first capital of the United States. It was where George Washington was inaugurated the first president; where the Northwest Ordinance, mandating westward expansion, was debated and signed in 1787; where the essays comprising the Federalist Papers advocating the ratification of the U.S. Constitution were written (by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay); where the First Congress sat in 1789; and where the Bill of Rights was introduced. As the place where Hamilton conceived of an American financial system, New York also became the American business capital of the country. Against the philosophical and intellectual framework of the Enlightenment, the New Yorkers who participated in the country’s founding were immersed in an often-fractious atmosphere of debate, intellectual discourse, and political experimentation. In 1804, as this historical moment was passing, the New-York Historical Society was founded, motivated by an expressed need to collect items pertaining to the history of the state and of the nation, as well as the mission to capture and interpret not only the revolutionary and Federal eras, but the years to come. In so doing, New-York Historical deliberately participated in the creation of a self-consciously American culture.

Michael and Leah Weisberg Monumental Treasures Wall

Covering the thirty-foot wall beyond the columns stands a climate-controlled, ten-foot-tall case that showcases the New-York Historical Society’s maps, architectural drawings, documents and other fragile works on paper previously too large to be put on display. Through July 1, 2012, The Michael and Leah Weisberg Monumental Treasures Wall is featuring rare copies of three of the greatest maps ever produced in American history: John Mitchell’s 1755 Map of the British and French Dominions in North America; Bernard Ratzer’s 1770 version of his Plan of the City of New York in North America: Surveyed in the Years 1766 & 1767; and Henry Popple’s 1733 Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto.

Mitchell’s map served as the guide in September 1783 for the Treaty of Paris between Great Britain and the United States at the Revolutionary War’s end. The featured copy belonged to John Jay, one of the US negotiators, and bears his notations marking the boundary settlements of the new nation. Ratzer’s plan of New York is possibly the finest eighteenth-century map of an American city. The rare first issue from 1770 depicts Manhattan’s natural topography as well as a detailed prospect of the growing metropolis from the vantage point of Governors Island. Finally, Henry Popple’s large-scale, definitive map of British colonial possessions in North America offers a glimpse of the continent in the decades prior to the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The map was distributed widely to each American colony in the mid-eighteenth century.

Due to their size, it is unlikely the Popple and Mitchell map will be exhibited again.

History Under Your Feet

Under visitors’ feet, the Smith Gallery also features nine porthole-like floorcases displaying objects found by avocational archaeologists and other professionals seeking history below the ground of New York City. Objects include arrowheads, military buttons, bullets and a colossal oyster shell excavated at an extant nineteenth-century tavern.

Funding for History Under Your Feet provided by Con Edison

here is new york

New-York Historical also displays a rotating selection from the approximately 6,200 photographs comprising the powerful here is new york collection of images taken in New York on and in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The collection echoes the Founding New Yorkers theme of resilience, renewal and transformation emerging from the ashes of catastrophic events. Accompanying the photography installation will be a large fragment of a fire truck destroyed during the 9/11 attack.

Pop Shop ceiling by Keith Haring

A ceiling mural by Keith Haring hangs above the admissions desk. The work is taken from the interior of the Pop Shop, which Haring opened in SoHo in 1986 to sell shirts, posters, and other merchandise reproducing his artwork. He painted the shop’s entire interior in black-and-white. The mural was a gift from the Keith Haring Foundation upon the store’s closing in 2005.

The 77th Street Rotunda and the Judith & Howard Berkowitz Sculpture Court

In the midst of the American Revolution, two British soldiers broke into the Mill Street Synagogue and desecrated two Torah Scrolls. The place of worship was home to Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in North America, founded by a group of Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent in 1654. Remarkably, the Torah scrolls survived the act of vandalism. One of them is displayed in the Berkowitz Sculpture Court, on loan from Congregation Shearith Israel in the City of New York–The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue.

We surround this object with four panels from Richard Haas’s 1982 Cityscape cycle, created for the windowless corporate dining room of the former Philip Morris company headquarters on Park Avenue and 42nd Street. The arrangement sets the Torah in dialogue with the city's past, present and future, and reinforces the city’s underpinnings of diversity, toleration and resilience.