People, Place, and Influence: The Collection at 100
As Contributing Curator, I am delighted to celebrate People, Place, and Influence: The Collection at 100 presented by the Museum of the City of New York
Opening October 13, 2023
The Museum of the City of New York was founded in 1923, “to do all things necessary, fit, or suitable to create a love for and interest in all things pertaining to the city of New York” and “to foster an understanding of the distinctive nature of urban life in the world’s most influential metropolis.” In many ways this statement still applies to the mission, collection, and educational projects of the museum as it marks it’s 100th anniversary.
Over time, the way the museum has gone about creating “a love for and interest in” the city has changed in significant ways. As contributing curator to the Museum’s centennial exhibition People, Place, and Influence: The Collection at 100 it was my job to dig through the museum’s archives and exhibition history to tell the story of the museum’s founding and to chart how the museum has interpreted its mission over time through its exhibitions. In the main gallery, museum curator Lilly Tuttle explores the museum’s vast collection. She investigates how 100 years of collecting New York’s past — from the ephemeral to the profound — paints a portrait of the city and its people. Telling the history of any institution runs the risk of navel-gazing, but for someone interested not only in the history of this museum in particular, but also the history of museums in general, MCNY is a telling case study.
At the heart of the museum’s work has always been a tension between the promise of an egalitarian and democratic home for the stories of all New Yorkers and an elitist dedication to a certain kind of New Yorker – white, upper-class descendants of “Old New York” families, and the so-called “Great Men” of New York’s past. This tension is expressed in the simultaneous desire to collect and exhibit the finest and best of the city’s cultural expressions (the finest silver, the most beautiful interiors, the most expensive Worth gowns) and a desire to explore and preserve the lives of everyday New Yorkers. Both desires have shaped the museum’s trajectory in varying degrees over its 100 years.
Trowel commemorating the laying of the corner stone of MCNY, April 30, 1929 Museum Purchase, 1929 (29.175)
As much as the museum was founded to inspire a “love for and interest in” the city, it was also the product of a profound anxiety amongst many of its upper-class founders—particularly Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer whose ideas shaped the museum’s founding vision—to preserve what was left of the old city—of their city—before it was swept away to make room for the rapidly developing “modern” city of skyscrapers, jazz, automobiles, and new money. As The New Yorker noted in 1926, “Progress is working the devil with us, and we ought to have a place to put our nicest things before they are washed out to sea, together with the cracker jack boxes and the orange peels.”
For those who shared Mrs. Van Rensselaer’s vision—including founding director Henry Collins Brown—preserving an idealized vision of “Old New York” was no mere vanity project. They considered it necessary to educate the masses of immigrants and their children (real or imagined) who knew nothing of “Old New York” (or, perhaps worse, were busy constructing their own New York City out of their own cultures and lived experiences, one that cared little for “Old New York”). As early trustee and founder of the museum’s education department John Van Pelt put it, the museum should teach New York’s children about “great men of the city” so that they would “be filled with desire to emulate those of real worth.” Today we can see clearly that this impulse was xenophobic at best.
At the same time, the museum’s second director Hardinge Scholle espoused a more democratic vision for the museum— telling the Times in 1929 that he wanted to “collect material on private houses and tenements, dogcarts and elevated trains, even every newsreel ever made in the city.” And it must not be overlooked that one of the museum’s founding collections—thousands of views of New York City—was donated by J. Clarence Davies, a Bronx-based real estate mogul who certainly did not fit the “Old New York” mold. He had assembled his collection as a marketing tool. “I bought them to show to clients,” he said, “in order to stir their imagination as to what was going to happen in the Bronx.” Nor did, in many ways, influential founding trustee James Speyer, a wealthy banker with a German Jewish (rather than Dutch protestant “Old New York”) background, who perhaps saw the museum as a way to earn credibility with potential “Old New York” clients.
From its founding, the museum’s collections and exhibitions teetered between these two poles of preserving and exhibiting elite and everyday New York. On the one hand acquiring a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington (1945) and exhibiting A Distinguished Family of New York: the Waltons—merchants whose wealth was largely based in the slave trade (1951). While on the other hand, acquiring Federal Art Project photographs of the Depression era city (1943) and exhibiting Alexander Alland’s photographs of tenement life on the Lower East Side (Children of Romany in New York, 1941). While Janet Pinney’s education department introduced Please Touch (1955)—a gallery of Dutch artifacts for children to handle—an innovative idea at the time.
Later, director Joseph V. Nobel would attempt to address the “stuck in amber” quality of the museum’s exhibitions by confronting contemporary issues head-on through a series of exhibitions including How Green Was My City (1971) which paired bucolic 19th century prints and paintings with contemporary photographs of what might have then been called “urban decay”, and The Drug Scene (1971) which opened with three coffins and was, according to the Times, “spare, bare, and uncompromising.”
New York Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable expressed a feeling of “cultural shock” when she visited in 1971 to review How Green Was My City. During the lead up to the city’s fiscal crisis she wrote, “Outside is the sad, shabby, paranoid city of despair” while, “inside is a world of drawing rooms and polished silver and bullseye mirrors with convex, wonderful glimpses into a past of sailing ships and tree-lined streets and harbor views.”
She continued, “to get to that world right now you’ve got to pass the ‘Drug Scene’ on the ground floor, a current show that spotlights caskets and messages of terror. After that—gentility and polished mahogany. Then and now. Trauma all the way.” Huxtable’s discomfort reveals the key questions that still face MCNY: How does the reality of the world outside the museum compare to the world preserved within it? And, importantly, who decides what goes inside?
My portion of the exhibition examines at 100 years of MCNY’s changing exhibitions to begin to understand how generations of curators and staff grappled with the questions Huxtable identified. As MCNY’s groundbreaking photography curator Grace Mayer wrote, changing exhibitions, “make a living museum rather than a mausoleum.”
All of this back and forth between telling elite and everyday stories has created a museum with a mixed record of welcoming in and telling the stories of all New Yorkers, but it has also created a place with 750,000 objects ranging from the strange (a lock of George Washington’s hair) to the profound (Jacob Riis’s activist photographs of poverty on the Lower East Side) from the everyday (hundreds of postcards depicting the Statue of liberty) to the one-of-a-kind (one of Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty maquettes). All of them ripe for reinterpretation by today’s more broad-minded curators.
Exploring the institutional and exhibition history of MCNY reveals its strengths and weaknesses, its priorities and omissions, its curiosities and biases. Importantly, MCNY has survived while other city museums have not (the Philadelphia History Museum, likewise founded in the 1930s, closed in 2018). It has grown both in its physical building, its public profile, and its commitment to storytelling. It will continue to thrive by not shying away from the peculiarities of its history but by understanding them and by looking to the future.
Learn more here.