George B. Post (1837-1913), an American architect trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition, is perhaps best known for his New York City landmark buildings, including the New York Stock Exchange, City College, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. After working as a draftsman for Richard Morris Hunt, Post opened his first architectural firm in New York City…

From the title Scholars and Gentlemen, one of the essential histories written about the New-York Historical Society and that dates from the 1980s, one might get the wrong impression, that only men played a role in the life of the institution over the course of its 216 years. Yet many women have played significant roles…

Could a subway station have a grand piano, chandeliers, and a fountain with goldfish to boot? Alfred Ely Beach certainly believed so in the years following the Civil War, and, in fact, he was not deterred in creating such a subway, one that debuted 150 years ago, on February 26, 1870. Beach (1826-1896) was an…

2019 is a year to celebrate the richness of American literature, as poet James Russell Lowell was born on February 22, 1819, two months ago we marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Walt Whitman, and now we certainly want to pause and note that Herman Melville has his bicentennial natal day on August 1….

For much of the 19th century, New York City’s public transportation was racially segregated, and African Americans were forced to ride on specially designated horse-drawn street cars.  Newspapers documented acts of resistance to these policies of segregation by members of the African American community, some of whom took the street car companies to court. Three examples are cited here. On Sunday,…

This post is by Lenge Hong, Cataloging and Metadata Technician for the Robertson Digital Project. The New-York Historical Society and the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) are excited to announce that the photographs of Robert L. Bracklow (1849-1919) have been digitized and are available to view at METRO’s Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York site. A contemporary…

If not quite a household name, George Templeton Strong enjoys a certain notoriety among historians as a pungent observer of 19th century New York. His 2250-page diary, held by the New-York Historical Society, has been described as “the greatest of American diaries, and one of the world’s great diaries,” and has been cited or quoted…