Tweed Courthouse Move and Museum Expansion
In 2000 a plan was floated for the museum to relocate to the historic Tweed Courthouse by City Hall in Lower Manhattan. El Museo del Barrio would then have moved across the street to occupy the former Museum of the City of New York building. In the end, Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to site the new New York City Department of Education in the Tweed Courthouse instead, causing then-director Robert R. McDonald to tender his resignation.
The Museum's new director, Susan Henshaw Jones, recommitted MCNY to its Upper East Side neighborhood by planning an extension to the Museum. The groundbreaking for this extension, which includes new gallery space, took place on August 2, 2006; and it was completed in February 2008 with a ribbon cutting later that same year.
The pavilion gallery is 3,000-square-foot (280 m2) glass addition, which has two levels for which to display artifacts. The original 1932 Georgian Revival building was also restored during this project as well as additions including a vault for the museum's silver collection, a research room and a room for the handling of artifacts. The total costs for the first phase of refurbishments came to $28 million.
In late 2011, the Museum temporarily took over operation of the South Street Seaport Museum which reopened in January 2012.
Read more about this topic: Museum Of The City Of New York
Famous quotes containing the words courthouse, move, museum and/or expansion:
“... research is never completed ... Around the corner lurks another possibility of interview, another book to read, a courthouse to explore, a document to verify.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“A Man who always acts in the Severity of Wisdom, or the Haughtiness of Quality, seems to move in a personated Part: It looks too Constrained and Theatrical for a Man to be always in that Character which distinguishes him from others.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every expansion of government in business means that government in order to protect itself from the political consequences of its errors and wrongs is driven irresistibly without peace to greater and greater control of the nation’s press and platform. Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)