Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [766]
Bierstadt’s work could be seen at the National Academy of Design, now in a new and highly praised Venetian Gothic building at Fourth Avenue and 23rd Street, but that building, indeed all current artistic showplaces, seemed insufficient to wealthy New Yorkers determined to match the best that Europe could offer. John Jay, descendant of the governor and chief justice, convinced the Union League Club that the city needed a permanent public art gallery. The club’s Art Committee, headed by George Palmer Putnam, included Samuel P. Avery, the respected art dealer then helping William Vanderbilt and other millionaires form their private collections. The committee convoked a public meeting in late 1869, out of which in January 1870 came the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a title no other city would have assumed. Its trustees and officers commingled prominent businessmen and lawyers with leading artists like poet-editor Bryant, architect Hunt, and landscaper Olmsted.
The Metropolitan’s new president, John Taylor Johnston, set out to obtain for the institution a “more or less complete collection of objects illustrative of the History of Art from the earliest beginnings to the present time.” He made some early headway by buying up the private collections of Europeans made desperate for funds by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (rather as Tiffany had done with jewels). He exhibited these prizes in rented quarters on the Rialto—the former Douglas Cruger mansion at 128 West 14th Street—preserving its elite status by remaining closed on evenings and Sundays, the only times most working people could attend.
The influential trustees next set their sights on a permanent home. As so often, they found in Tweed a helpful associate. Tweed prevailed on the state legislature to assign the museum a portion of Central Park, in the low 80s off Fifth Avenue—far from the downtown rabble and close to other new cultural institutions. Among these was the Lenox Library (1875), at Fifth Avenue and 71st Street, which Richard Morris Hunt had designed for the scholarly book collector and millionaire rentier James Lenox. Up till then Lenox had piled his volumes in a carelessly kept-up town house that appalled his wealthy neighbors. Now he made his eighty-five thousand books accessible (providing a half-million-dollar endowment to care for them), though only to scholars. Ground was broken in 1874 for the Metropolitan Museum—an institution built on municipal land, supported with public funds, but controlled by private trustees—and it would move into its new quarters in 1880.
Across Central Park, a group of prominent men set out to build an American Museum of Natural History, modeled on European institutions and inspired by the Museum of Comparative Zoology that Louis Agassiz had created at Harvard in 1860. Albert Bickmore, an Agassiz student, proposed to wealthy amateur members of the Lyceum of Natural Sciences that they purchase two large private natural history collections then up for sale and use them as the core of a new establishment. Theodore Roosevelt Sr., a leading glass importer and amateur naturalist, agreed to help; he got J. P. Morgan and corporate attorney Joseph Choate involved, and the enterprise was launched.
The founders were prominent men—A. T. Stewart, James Brown, and William Dodge, in addition to Roosevelt, Morgan, and Choate—though not yet of the highest rank in New York society, not quite on a par with Rhinelanders, Livingstons, or Stuyvesants. Creating a natural history museum would strengthen their social position while underscoring their commitment to newly prized scientific values. It would also, as they stressed in their fund-raising appeals, rectify the disgraceful situation that “nearly all the capitals of Europe and more important cities in our own land” had natural history