0.3 Chapter one: crisis in the headlines

Part one: against all odds: the story of the new-york historical society

Chapter one: crisis in the headlines

Historical Society to Close Library

The board of the New-York Historical Society voted yesterday to shut down the institution's library on Feb. 19. All public programs are to be canceled, with the exception of a traveling show of 90 Audubon watercolors that had long been planned, and 41 staff members will be dismissed; a skeleton crew of 35 will be left to handle security, conservation and disposition of the collections.

NEW YORK TIMES, FEB. 4, 1993

To many people, the news was a shock. Following the closing of the Society's museum just five weeks before, the shutting of the library was tantamount to a for-profit business's filing for bankruptcy protection. Hard as it was to believe, the Society's museum and library holdings, arguably the single greatest collection of materials documenting early American and New York life, were at risk of being broken up and dispersed.

Reaction to the news was swift and unanimous. Six hundred scholars at forty campuses across the nation signed a petition urging New York's city and state officials to "keep the collections intact and available to New Yorkers." The New York Times ran an editorial calling for "responsible stewardship of so irreplaceable a part of the city's 'memory.'" And New York's governor, Mario Cuomo, issued a statement in support of the Society, calling it "a vital part of the cultural her­itage of New York State."

Founded in 1804 to collect and preserve materials relating to the early history of New York and the United States, The New-York Historical Society is home to one of the nation's most distinguished research libraries. Its collections include ap­proximately eight hundred thousand volumes and more than three million man­uscripts, maps, photographs, prints, and architectural drawings that collectively provide an unparalleled picture of the early history of New York. But it is not just a library. The Society's museum is New York's oldest, predating the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by nearly seventy years. The art holdings have grown to a collection of over 1.6 million objects, including world-renowned Hud­son River School paintings, an extensive collection of Tiffany glasswork, and 433 of the 435 original watercolors used for John J. Audubon's classic work, Birds of America.

With such highly esteemed collections and seemingly broad support, how could the Society be in such trouble? Although the answer to that question is com­plex—indeed, searching for answers to it is the central purpose of this book—the catalyst for the Society's crisis was really quite simple. After many years of oper­ating deficits that had eroded the Society's capital base, there were insufficient fun­gible resources to pay the day-to-day operating costs of the institution. In other words, the Society had run out of cash. Generating cash and, more important, recurring cash flow would be essential if the Society was to survive. A special advisory committee, which included prestigious specialists adept at turning around troubled for-profit companies, was assembled to evaluate alternatives and to try to craft a workable solution.