By Claudia Keenan

Since at least the turn of the 20th century, New Yorkers raised the possibility of establishing a city museum. In 1904 when subway excavations at Bowling Green turned up a stone from the early 17th-century Fort George, a local author named Charles Hemstreet opposed giving it to the New-York Historical Society.

“Once in the possession of the Society,” he told a reporter, “it would be as inaccessible to the general public as if it had been left in its underground resting place.” He urged the creation of a “municipal museum.”[1]

MCNY Display in Gracie Mansion, 1923. *Valentine’s Manual of Old New York*, 1925

In 1905, the editors of the New-York Herald observed that New York should have a city museum just like the new one in Chicago.[2] A year later came a proposal to build one in Riverside Park in conjunction with Columbia University. More proposals followed.[3] Finally, in 1917 the idea sputtered to life with an exhibit on the New York City budget at the old City College Building on Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street.[4] Nothing came of it despite the fact that a hallmark of the Progressive Era was the rise of a new generation of civic leaders and the reinvention of museums with an eye toward education and citizenship.

The New York socialite and author, May Denning King Van Rensselaer, would not have considered herself a Progressive reformer. Yet she recognized that change was inevitable and institutions must adapt. In 1917, the life member of the New-York Historical Society, who enjoyed poking the patriciate to which she belonged, upended the Society’s annual meeting with an indictment of its board and staff.[5] While her suggestions were rejected and her behavior criticized, Van Rensselaer’s jabs were on point. The Society didn’t welcome or educate the public, work with the public schools on curriculum, and display most of its treasures.

Eventually, the Society’s trustees would embrace most of Van Rensselaer’s ideas. In the meantime, her outrage emboldened a 56-year old writer and preservationist, Henry Collins Brown, to launch his own New York City museum. He had a specific vision: appeal to children and immigrants, focus on exhibits not research, and emphasize the lives of ordinary New Yorkers instead of those with illustrious lineage. With an emphasis on the growth of the city, he hoped to cultivate a broad audience — the antithesis of the New-York Historical Society, he believed.

Brown lacked influence and backers and his best friends, two librarians at the New-York Historical Society, tried to dissuade him from opening what they called “an opposition shop.”[6] Brown persisted and founded the Museum of the City of New York in 1923 but his triumph ended in personal sorrow. After serving as its director for three years, he was asked to leave. Until the museum’s 75th anniversary in 1998, Brown received scarce acknowledgement.

***

An unlikely candidate to start a museum, Henry Collins Brown was ten years old when he and his family emigrated from Scotland to America in 1871 and settled in the Eastern District in Brookyln. The boy liked to wander along the waterfront and watch the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.[7] During these years, he developed a passion for the history of New York City.[8] Long before dropping out of school at the age of fifteen, he started gathering and memorizing historical information from books, newspapers, magazines, and interrogations of old-timers.

Young Henry, 1880s. Courtesy of Cornelia Todd Brown

Brown found his way to City Hall Park, sold magazine advertising, and purportedly worked as a reporter for the New York Sun under the editorship of Charles Anderson Dana.[9] Desperate to be known as an authority on the history of New York City, Brown faced an uphill battle. Somewhat scruffy and irreverent, tagged as an immigrant, he would naturally be barred from society and the exclusive history organizations, such as the Municipal Art Society and the City History Club of New York, which it spawned.

Thus rejected, Brown tried to make his reputation as an author at a time when popular histories of the city proliferated. His first book, Book of Old New-York (1913) did not fare well.[10] Despite the poor sales, Brown wrote twelve similar books well into the mid-thirties. He called them his Valentine’s Manuals, a revival of the original Manuals created by David T. Valentine, a clerk of the city’s common council who compiled and published them between 1840 and 1868. Initially, those Manuals contained data only; with the addition of letters and illustrations, they formed an important documentary record.[11]

Frontispiece, *Valentine’s Manual* , 1920

While Brown’s Manuals bankrupted him, in the early 1920s he met success within the historic preservation movement that flourished in New York City. He led the charge to return City Hall Park to its Colonial-era design, including the restoration of the Liberty Pole. Brown also negotiated the demolition of a monolithic Beaux-Arts post office at the southern end of the park.[12] Therefore, when he started to rally support for a city museum, he was known to government officials and activists in historic preservation and commemoration. These connections enabled him to assemble a board and incorporate in 1923.

The museum first inhabited the decrepit Gracie Mansion in Carl Schurz Park. It was a historic building, bestowed upon Brown by the parks commissioner, Francis P. Gallatin, after a tug-of-war with Mrs. Van Rensselaer.[13] Brown installed exhibits, fending off interference from his trustees. He thought he could work around them.[14] In fact, the trustees were making plans without Brown.[15] Purchasing land for a new museum counted among them.[16]

By spring of 1926, Brown had been dismissed. Ironically, the man who banished him had also found it difficult to gain entrée to New York society. James Speyer, a very wealthy banker, soon became chairman of the museum’s board. His arrogance was so insufferable that J.P. Morgan and Otto Kahn refused to work with him in business and philanthropy.[17] Like Henry Collins Brown, Speyer existed in the margin, and he hoped that the new museum would get him to the center. Indeed, it brought Speyer — not Brown — considerable accolades.[18]

Historically, major cultural institutions were created by individuals and groups with social prestige. Brown’s challenge to the custodians of the city’s history — more than criticism; a new game in town — displeased the old guard, some of whom objected strenuously to the new museum. But Brown was well-suited to forge ahead because he didn’t care what they thought.

However, he proved ill-suited to direct the Museum of the City of New York. During the 1920s, expertise, credentialization, and rigorous scholarship became requisite for library and museum directors. While Brown was a local author with a historic preservation notch in his belt, a raconteur who knew every date and detail, whose own story was woven into the city’s previous fifty-three years, he could not meet the new standards.

Brown retreated to his home in Hastings-on-Hudson. He could no longer fight off anxiety and depression, suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized. When he emerged, he produced a different kind of feat: an acclaimed memoir of mental illness, A Mind Mislaid, published in 1937. He died in 1961, just shy of a century.

Claudia Keenan holds a Ph.D. in the history of education from New York University. This post is part of a larger project about Henry Collins Brown.

[1] “Would Have City Keep Relic,” New York Times, August 1, 1904, 12.

[2] “A Municipal Museum,” January 29, 1905, 8.

[3] “The Proposed Riverside Improvement,” letter to the editor, New York Times, April 15, 1906; “A Municipal Museum,” New York Times, October 20, 1911.

[4] “Municipal Museum Shows Graphically City’s Activities,” The Sun, December 9, 1915.

[5] “Tells Historical Society It Is Dead,” New York Times, January 3, 1917; “Plans to Enliven Historical Society,” New York Times, January 4, 1917; “Society of Patriotic New Yorkers Formed,” New York Times, December 2, 1920; see also R.W.G. Vail, Knickerbocker Birthday (NY, 1954), 205-214.

[6] Alexander J. Wall to Henry Collins Brown, New-York Historical Society, General Correspondence files, March 6, 1923, F5.

[7] Wiggins, “Henry Collins Brown; Gracie Mansion Museum,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 20, 1924.

[8] Brown, Henry Collins, “Some Recollections of Old Brooklyn As It Was in the 70’s and 80’s,” Valentine’s Manual of Old New York (NY, 1920), 158.

[9] “Henry C. Brown, Historian, Dead,” New York Times, July 14, 1961; Faith Brown Bertsche, The Life of Henry Collins Brown (Georgia, 2000).

[10] Henry Collins Brown to Robert H. Kelby, November 9, 1914, New-York Historical Society, Box 80, F1.

[11] “Obituary, David T. Valentine,” New York Times, February 26, 1869; “David T. Valentine’s Work on the Common Council Manuals,” New York Times, April 28, 1895.

[12] Henry Collins Brown, A Plea for the Restoration of City Hall Park to its Colonial Aspect, (NY, 1919).

[13] “Gracie Mansion in Dispute,” New York Times, June 12, 1923; Henry Collins Brown to Alexander J. Wall, August 30, 1923, New-York Historical Society, General Correspondence Files.

[14] Henry Collins Brown to Alexander J. Wall, November 14, 1924; March 22, 1925; September 17, 1925. New-York Historical Society, General Correspondence Files.

[15] James Speyer to Thomas B. Appleget, February 13, 1926, Offices of the Messrs. Rockefeller Records, “Cultural Interests,” Series E, Museums, Box 17.

[16] “Architects Plan New City Museum,” New York Times, February 26, 1928, Real Estate, 2. The search for land on which to build the new museum commenced in early 1927.

[17] Liebman, George. The Fall of the House of Speyer (2015), 100-101 and Theresa M. Collins, Art, Money & Modern Time (2002), 48-49, 74.

[18] James Speyer Papers (1896-1972), “Museum of the City of New York,” New York Public Library.

Henry Collins Brown and the Museum of the City of New York