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New York scene paintings were borrowed for an eclectic range of special exhibitions mounted by the Museum between 1932 and the mid-1970s, including Glimpses of Fifth Avenue (1932), New York at the Turn of the Century (1936), East River in the Making (1940), Painting the Town: Small Paintings by Esther Goetz (1947), The Nathan M. Orbach Collection of Contemporary New York Paintings (1947), New York Scenes/Broadway (1950), Three Rivers Around Manhattan (1949), Marine Paintings by Gordon Grant (1954), Contemporary Paintings of New York by Virginia Livingston and Robert Freiman (1959), Peter Cooper's New York (1961), How Green Was My City (1972), and Cecil C. Bell: The Vanished City (1973).

Today, the temperament of the so-called Ash Can School is represented selectively in the Museum's holdings only through prints, sketches, and magazine "art." A small gouache-and-watercolor view of the Washington Square Arch, attributed to George B. Luks, entered the collection in 1991 through the Robert R. Preato Bequest (91.76.28). A policy of not accepting works by contemporary artists was sometimes cited in letters declining gift offers written by the Museum's early Print Department staff. However, no confirmation of this institutional "policy," probably referenced as a diplomatic excuse for rejecting work, has been uncovered in back records, and acquisitions of photography and graphic materials by living artists at the same period are evidence against any comprehensive Museum restrictions on collecting work-of-the-times.

  Realist views of Sheridan Square and MacDougal Street by Kline dating from the same period also survive. A biographer of the artist later characterized these quickly painted studies as "buckeye paintings which helped pay the rent." During the 1930s and 1940s Kline and his wife moved around Greenwich Village, occupying a succession of inexpensive walk-ups and loft apartments. In 1939 he participated in the biannual Greenwich Village Outdoor Art Show, a magnet for tourists known for generating impulse sales. Kline's career as a Village artist and resident is discussed by Evie T. Joselow in "The Early Work of Franz Kline --The Bleecker Street Tavern Murals, 1940," CUNY Graduate Center, paper for the course "New York Painting," 1986. This paper is housed in the Museum Archives.

  Records indicate that Norse had studied landscape painting at the National Academy of Design in New York between 1883 and 1885, while living on Third Avenue and then East 125th Street. In a letter that Norse wrote to New York City gallery owner William MacBeth from the Potsdam Normal School in 1904, the artist recounts having "been buried up here for the past dozen years or so," during which time he "accumulated a lot of pictures." Norse took charge of the school's drawing program in 1893 and resigned from the faculty around 1905. The results of recent research into the artist's career are collected in the Museum Archives.

  The history, controversies, research, and restoration attempts weathered by Blockhouse Number 1 are summarized in "Historic Structure Report, Blockhouse No. 1, Central Park, New York City," prepared by the Central Park Conservancy, April 1991, in the Museum Archives.

The connections between the formation of the Museum of the City of New York and the larger politics of preservation and reclamation of the local history movement in New York City are discussed by Max Page in his provocative dissertation "The Creative Destruction of New York City: Landscape, Memory, and the Politics of Place, 1900 -1930" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995), chap. 5. This chapter was revised for publication as "A Vanished City Is Restored: Inventing and Displaying the Past at the Museum of the City of New York," Winterthur Portfolio 34, no. 1 (1999): 49 -64.

Brown, a history enthusiast but not a trained museum professional, struggled under the task and was replaced in 1926 by Harding Scholle, then a promising young curator at the Chicago Art Institute. The Museum's trustees gave Scholle time at the outset of his tenure to travel to Europe to study models of city-history museums abroad, including the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, the Museum of London, and the city museums of Berlin and Hamburg. He retired from active service as the Museum's top administrator in 1951.

Both Brown and Stokes were pioneering preservationists, Brown noted for his advocacy efforts on behalf of preserving City Hall and its park, Stokes for his work in saving the facade of the Bank of the United States on Wall Street, later installed in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Beginning in 1916, Brown had spearheaded publication of the historical compendium Valentine's Manual. He is said to have urged the Museum to adopt the Vanderbilt Mansion on 58th Street as its home, in hopes of sparing the building from demolition. Stokes, a professionally trained architect, housing reformer, and self-disciplined historian, had deep family roots in various New York City charities. He became an informal adviser to Harding Scholle, who assumed the Museum's directorship in 1926. For twenty years Stokes also served as a respected board member of the New York Public Library and the city's Art Commission.

Founded in 1805, the Free School Society erected New York Free School Number 1 in 1806, on Madison Street near Pearl Street. In 1808 the former Arsenal Building was conferred on the society as Free School Number 2, "on the condition that they educate all the poor children in the Almshouse." The roughly dressed boys playing outside the columned Arsenal Building probably represent pupils drawn from this source. A minor error seems to have been committed in the painter's identification of this structure as the first New York Free School. An engraved view of Free School Number 2, nearly identical in composition, was published in Valentine's Manual (1866), p. 604.

From its inception, the Museum's founders embraced the camera as the most expedient tool for realizing their objective of building a definitive pictorial record of the city's appearance, with old prints and maps filling in where photography could not. As early as 1924, a proposal was under consideration to fund a photographer to document every New York street, running from the Bronx to the Battery. Although this plan was never realized, realtor J. Clarence Davies, a prominent patron of the Museum, donated a similar project to its Print Archive in the early 1930s: a record of every wood-frame building still standing on Manhattan Island, which he had commissioned from Charles Von Urban, a professional photographer. Occasional expenditures on contemporary photographs were authorized by the Museum for exhibitions and to expand the Print Archive.

Alva Johnson, "N.Y. Museum Gets City Relics in $500,000 Davies Collection: First Oil Painting and First Directory . . . ," New York Herald Tribune, March 2, 1929.

I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 153 -154. In his analysis of the hand-colored, engraved inset scene of the Restitutio View, Stokes mentioned the related painting soon to be given to the Museum, which was then in Davies' private possession: "An oil painting, evidently of seventeenth century or very early eighteenth century origin, and closely resembling the Restitutio View, has recently been found in an old home on Staten Island, and now belongs to Mr. J. Clarence Davies. Unfortunately, the former owner had the picture restored in Paris, and the work was very badly done. The view contains some anachronisms for which it is difficult to account, even if we suppose that an attempt was made to bring it up to date some years after it was first painted. Nevertheless, it is an interesting document and merits careful study" (p. 154).

Tony Hiss, "Foreword: A Closer Look," in Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps, 1527 -1995 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1997), pp. 14 -15.

Some art historians have interpreted this painting by James Ensor (1860 -1949) as the artist's personal diatribe against rival groups of contemporary European painters --hailed as avant-garde by some critics --whose work he loathed. Bridaham may have encountered Ensor's painting in Antwerp in 1930 -1931, when he was studying "gargoyles and grotesques" in Europe and traveling to galleries throughout the continent under the auspices of the American Field Service. He had returned to Manhattan by 1932, when the G. R. D. Gallery mounted a show of his small paintings of "people and places." Critics commented on the "alien gaiety" of Bridaham's work in the context of the deepening American Depression, with a writer from Art Digest commending his bright, strange scenes as "the artistic equivalent of a good cocktail" ("Bridaham Cocktail Mixer," Art Digest [February 1932]).

The flowering of Williamsburg's art colony in recent years is reviewed by Roberta Smith in "Brooklyn Haven for Art Heats Up," New York Times, November 6, 1998.

When Davies made his major donation to the Museum of the City of New York in 1929, interviews with the collector were in demand. For one period account of his collection's genesis, as recounted by Davies, see William C. Garner, "A Fortune in Old New York Pictures," Little Old New York 4, no. 7 (June 1929): 23 -27.

Quoted by Johnson in "N.Y. Museum Gets City Relics."

Possibly these New York views decorated Blair's apartment on Park Avenue. Before 1951 she had donated ceramics and other decorative-arts items to the Museum of the City of New York. Between 1932 and 1949, loan records also document the short-term stays of selected cityscapes from her private collection. The Blair Bequest occasioned an article acknowledging the gift's importance by Grace M. Mayer, the Museum's curator of prints and photographs under whom care of the paintings collection then rested. See Grace M. Mayer, "Views of Manhattan Island," Magazine Antiques 62, no. 6 (December 1952): 498 -502.

Ronald G. Pisano, "Foreword," in The Robert R. Preato Collection of New York City Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1992), p. 7. For a fine contextual summary of the collection see, in the same catalogue, Cassandra Langer's essay "In the Same Space: The Robert R. Preato Collection of New York City Art," pp. 9 -16.

Wong was the subject of a 1998 mid-career retrospective organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, which contains five overview essays analyzing his evolution and influences, including graffiti, as an artist. See Marcia Tucker, Dan Cameron, Barry Blinderman, Yasmin Ramirez, Lydia Yee, and Carlo McCormick, Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Rizzoli, 1998).

The artist's reminiscences were sought in preparation for the survey exhibition Around the Town, marking the 1993 gift of fourteen scene paintings to the Museum by the artist and his wife, Grace La Gambina. Some of these memories were distilled in the gallery-guide essay accompanying the exhibition: Jan Seidler Ramirez, Around the Town: Paintings by Vincent La Gambina (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1993).