By Bonnie Eissner
After decades of dashed plans, The New York Historical is finally on its way to realizing a dream to expand its space.
Most recently, in the mid-2000s, the museum flirted with enlarging its current building and erecting a residential tower on its adjacent vacant lot. But Robert A.M. Stern, the renowned architect who died last month and was a member of the museum, warned museum president Louise Mirrer against the move.
The museum, at Central Park West and West 77th Street, needed gallery space, not a condominium, Stern told Mirrer. “Bob knew, loved, and respected our collections, this institution in general, but our collections more specifically,” Mirrer said at a media briefing earlier this month, explaining how the apartment project eventually was abandoned in favor of a different sort of expansion.
The result, when it opens next June 18 in time for America’s 250th anniversary, will be the 71,000-square-foot, five-story Tang Wing for American Democracy.
Designed by RAMSA (Robert A.M. Stern Architects), the $175-million addition connects the museum’s past to its present. Even the granite for the new wing’s exterior was excavated from the same quarry in Deer Isle, Maine, as the stone used for its Central Park West building, completed in 1908 and last expanded in 1938.
Construction continues apace, with walls, floors, and ceilings largely in place. On a walkthrough last week, reporters got a sense of the generous proportions of rooms that will become galleries, classrooms, and a conservation space.
Museum-goers will be able to enter the new wing from the three visitor floors of the current building. Gallery space will grow by 36% with airy rooms of soaring ceilings and some natural light. Notably, the Klingenstein Family Gallery on the first floor will extend up to 42 feet, allowing the display of monumental artworks. Windows on its north side will face a new sculpture garden, where, among other works, life-size bronze statues of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton will stand, pistols raised, 10 paces apart as they did in their duel in 1804 — the year the museum was founded.
The new wing will allow a significant expansion of the museum’s efforts to expose students to American history and civics. The 3,000 6th graders who currently visit its Academy for American Democracy each year will grow 10-fold when the Tang Wing opens.
The new space will also include additional stack storage, enabling the museum to consolidate the extensive collections of its Patricia D. Klingenstein Library. And curators who work in disparate places in and outside of the museum will have a new 2,500-square-foot conservation studio, illuminated by indirect light from high windows.
At the very top of the new structure will be a rooftop garden with sweeping views of Central Park West and swaths of the Upper West Side. Just below that, two fourth-floor galleries are planned for an American LGBTQ+ Museum, due to open in late 2027. The partnership with the new institution, said benefactor H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang, chairwoman of The New York Historical’s board, will help the museum continue its “mission to tell the story of civil liberties for all Americans.”
The new wing is named for Hsu-Tang and her husband, Oscar L. Tang, in honor of their $20 million gift. The museum is raising $10 million to support exhibitions and programming for the new wing, with additional funds coming from $100 million in private philanthropy and $75 million in city, state, and federal support.
The late architect Robert Stern won’t see the wing he envisioned, but in a 2021 interview with Architectural Digest, he summed up, reportedly with a laugh, his view of The New York Historical’s place on the Upper West Side: “It’s a triple landmark. A landmark building on a landmark street in a landmark neighborhood.”
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A. M. Stern was a designer who worked with registered architects and PEs. Right, Philip Johnson also wasn’t an architect.