New York History in Twenty-Five Minutes

Sarah M. Henry

Located on the border of Manhattan’s Upper East Side and El Barrio (East Harlem), near the top end of the New York’s fabled “Museum Mile,” the Museum of the City of New York was founded in 1923 as the first museum in the United States dedicated to the study of a single city. Inspired by the growing historical preservation movement, its founders sought to save the past even as New York’s cityscapes were being transformed by the massive corporate rebuilding that razed Gilded Age landmarks and mansions and replaced them with the palaces of commerce and business that now typify Manhattan’s midtown. They also sought to provide civic education to the children of immigrants who had come to New York before the Great War and who now made New York one of the most diverse places on earth.

Today, the museum is dedicated to connect the past, present, and future of the five boroughs of New York City through exhibitions, publications, public and school programs, and collections. Recent exhibitions have included Robert Moses and the Modern City: Remaking the Metropolis, Black Style Now, Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War, and The Glory Days: New York Baseball 1947-1957. Upcoming exhibitions are Catholics in New York, 1947-1957 (opening May 2008), Campaigning for President: New York and the American Election, (June 2008) and Paris/New York: Design, Fashion, Culture 1935-1940 (September 2008).

In addition to these temporary exhibitions, it has long been a goal of the museum to tell the history of New York in a synoptic exhibition. After decades of unrealized plans, that goal will be met as part of a three-phase renovation and expansion project now underway and scheduled for completion in 2011. But how to fulfill the museum’s mission in the interim? In 2005, this need was addressed through the creation of an innovative multimedia presentation called Timescapes—an overview of four hundred years of the city’s history.

Rather than present a radically compressed version of the encyclopedic fourteen and a half hour New York: A Documentary Film by Ric Burns, the Museum took a different approach in this twenty-five minute overview. Working with James Sanders, cowriter of the Ric Burns series, and Jake Barton of Local Project, the museum created a film that takes the physical growth of the city as its central story. It uses a series of specially commissioned animated maps as the literal centerpiece of the presentation, flanked by images of the people and structures that populated the changing landscape. The New Yorker called it “an absorbing biography of the city, neatly organized into chapters that outline the city’s explosion out into its five boroughs, up into the skyscrapers, and down into the subway system.”

Visit the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Ave. at 104th St., <http://www.mcny.org>, Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Timescapes begins at 15 and 45 minutes past the hour from 10:15 a.m. to 4:15 p.m.