New York Historical Society
BY LORRAINE BERTAN
Whether history or art is
your passion, you will
find it at the New York
Historical Society. The Society was
founded in 1804 as New York City’s
first museum and was renovated in
2011, to incorporate multimedia
exhibits, using innovative ways to
display some of the unusual items in
the museum’s vast collection.
One gallery is devoted to the
Hudson River School landscapes
and features hundreds of James
Audubon’s watercolors for Birds
of America and a monumental
Pablo Picasso Theatre curtain
designed for the 1874 French play,
“The Three Cornered Hat, by Pedro
Antonio de Alarcón.” The Society
also has one of the world’s largest
collection of Tiffany lamps on view
in an exquisite two-story gallery. It
also contains some quirky examples
of Americana, such as George
Washington’s camp bed from Valley
Forge and the desk where Clement
Clarke Moore wrote “A Visit from
St. Nicholas.”
There are two large movie
screens, showing on the hour and
the half hour a pair of original
18-minute films, “Empire State of
Mind,” narrated by Liev Schreiber,
and “We Are Here,” concerning the
Suffragette Movement, narrated by
Meryl Streep. They are fascinating
to watch.
I visited two current exhibitions,
both attractively mounted,
“Betye Saar: Keepin’ It Clean”
and “Witnesses to History: Voting
Rights,” which are timely and emotionally
stirring. Betye Saar is an
African American artist, an activist
for women’s and minority rights.
Her work is based on household
cleaning items, mainly washboards,
and shows African American women
cleaning homes, whether theirs
or others. It brings to mind the movie,
“The Help,” and how domestic
workers are viewed and treated.
“Witnesses to History; Voting
Rights” describes the efforts made
to keep African Americans from
voting, after the Civil War into the
20th century, until the passage of
the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We
have seen how pervasive denying
voting rights has been during the
2018 election, so this exhibition is
particularly poignant, with letters
from Frederick Douglass in the late
1800s and Martin Luther King Jr,
and many examples of the March
from Selma.
A wonderful lure for the grandchildren
(or the child at heart), is
a current exhibit, which hails from
the British Library. “Harry Potter:
A History of Magic” celebrates the
20th anniversary of the U.S. publication
of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”
Capturing the traditions of folklore
and magic at the heart of the wildly
popular series, the exhibit unveils
century-old treasures, including
rare books, manuscripts, and magical
objects from the collections of
the British Library and New York
Historical Society, including original
drafts and drawings by J.K.
Rowling as well as Harry Potter
illustrator Jim Kay.
The Dimenna Children’s
Museum is designed for ages 8–13,
and focuses on the lives of children
who grew up in New York City
during seventeenth century through
1932. It describes “the children who
rode the famous orphan trains from
New York City to rural areas in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and the newsboys and
girls who sold newspapers on the
city streets in the early twentieth
century.”
Much to see and experience at
the Society, and you might want
to take a break for lunch at Caffè
Storico, a Venetian-inspired restaurant
on the first floor. There is a
beautiful library to look at, with
extraordinary stained-glass windows,
one depicting Henry Hudson
on the Half Moon. This is a lovely
venue, used for social events. If
you visit the Society, try to take a
guided tour. My guide was Stanley
Adelstein, and he was most informative
and interesting. If you are
in the mood and have the energy
for another museum, you can walk
across the street to the American
Museum of Natural History.
The New York Historical Society
is located at 170 Central Park West
(at 77 Street), New York City, NY
10024. For more information about
the New York Historical Society,
go online to: www.nyhistory.org or
call 212-873-3400. The museum is
closed on Mondays.
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library
Pablo Picasso Theatre curtain
Caffè Storico 20 NORTH SHORE TOWERS COURIER ¢ February 2019
/www.nyhistory.org
/www.nyhistory.org
