Museum of the City of New York

The story

The museum's first major exhibit, 'Old New York', was staged not in a museum at all but in the American Fine Arts Building on 57th Street in 1926. Henry Collins Brown had founded the institution just three years earlier, originally housing it in Gracie Mansion, where space ran out almost immediately. The success of that 1926 show forced a search for a permanent home, which became the neo-Georgian red brick building on Fifth Avenue, completed in 1930, with Adolph Alexander Weinman's statues of Hamilton and Clinton watching Central Park from the facade.