Room 101 of 111 · MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK · 1932

The city's museum

The red brick Georgian building at 103rd, the marble rotunda with its twin curving stairs, the timeline gallery, the works telling the city's own story.

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The city's museum

The Museum of the City of New York, the history

The Museum of the City of New York was founded in 1923 and first shown at Gracie Mansion. Its Georgian Colonial Revival building on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, designed by Joseph H. Freedlander, opened in 1932. The museum collects the city's own history, from Dutch settlement to the present.

Source · Museum of the City of New York ↗

What the room is built from

The Colonial Revival red brick and marble front with its portico and cupola, the entrance rotunda with two sweeping marble staircases, the New York at its core gallery with its wall of screens, the terrace on Fifth. Mood: museum mile, the top of the mile. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.

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FIVE BOROUGHS4 MIN
The Consolidation of 1898
How Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island became one city on January 1, 1898, and what the merger changed.
THE COUNT4 MIN
Counting New York
The decennial census from 1790 to 2020, the 2020 figure of 8,804,190, what the count decides, the undercount, and how a painted census differs.
BEFORE 16645 MIN
Before the City: Lenape, Mannahatta, New Amsterdam
The Lenape and Mannahatta, what the 1626 purchase documents actually say, New Amsterdam from 1624 to 1664, and the wall that named Wall Street.
← The courtyard on Fifth ALL 111 PLACES The oldest museum in the city →