Imposing and vault-like, the New-York Historical Society building on Central Park West in Manhattan used to be confused for a bank. The average passerby would never have guessed what lies beyond the towering pillars: a history museum, a storehouse of artifacts and artistic treasures, and a spectacular library (free and open to the public). Housed among them are the pistols from the Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton duel, and Hamilton's last doctor's bill. There are also the Terms of Surrender that Ulysses S. Grant presented to Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House at the end of the Civil War, and a Louisiana Purchase document signed N. Bonaparte.
Today, a visitor doesn't get an impression of the disparate parts. An expanded entrance into a spacious new gallery makes the building feel inviting—like a unified place to learn about the history of the city, and about America through the prism of New York City. Much of the metamorphosis has occurred under the guidance of Louise Mirrer, MA '77, PhD '80, who became president and CEO of the historical society 11 years ago. In that time, she bolstered the institution's finances, opened up its fortress-like façade and freshened up its staid reputation.
Despite her skills as an administrator, Mirrer thinks of herself first as a scholar—her specialty is medieval Spain—and because of that, there was a moment during her interview for the job when she feared she had lost it. A search committee member asked her what she is happiest doing, and she responded immediately and honestly, "doing research in a library." In that moment, the interviewer might have imagined Mirrer out of place at the society's glossy, crowded annual galas for which donors can pay up to $100,000 for a table.
Mirrer is probably the woman at the gala wearing the most modest jewelry and a moderately priced dress, but she surprised herself as well as her board by being good at raising money. "I think of myself as scholarly, but the key to fund-raising is to tell a good story. If you really love an institution, then it's effortless."
She has a staff inclined to be loyal in that effort. Asked how many of the current 250 employees she hired, she replies, "Almost all of them." She manages an annual budget of $20 million and six or seven shows per year; she's also at work on the 16 or so shows and special exhibits scheduled for the next few years.
There is a crucial part of Mirrer's team that she didn't hire; in fact they prepared the way for her. About a year before choosing Mirrer, Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman gave the historical society a collection they'd been building for decades—60,000 documents, many from pre-Revolutionary times—and, at the same time, joined the board. They also drew in fellow financier and philanthropist Roger Hertog, who oversaw the $100 million campaign the society concluded in 2012.
Many people are surprised to learn that the New-York Historical Society is the oldest museum in New York, established in 1804, 66 years before the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The founders' goal was to collect and preserve manuscripts, paintings, maps and artifacts. A drawback was that, for a long time, donors tended to give stuff but not money. In 1993 the museum closed the galleries and sold $18 million worth of art to pay the bills and shore up the endowment.
More recently, the society has hit its stride. Amid a fiercely competitive market for museum fund-raising, Mirrer has helped expand the society's endowment from $22 million to $50 million, and a 2008 renovation she oversaw brought life into the building, adding an interactive children's museum and the bright and airy Caffè Storico.
Mirrer grew up in Douglaston, Queens, and then in Great Neck, Long Island. As a girl she came to the historical society's library, accompanying her mother, Mildred, who was researching her master's thesis on New York City parks. Her father, Dr. Gerald Mirrer, an internal medicine specialist, was one of the founding doctors of Long Island's North Shore Hospital. After he died in 2014 at age 91, memorial gifts were requested for an exhibit in the historical society's children's museum about the first African-American physician in New York. Mirrer and her family were remembering his special interest in the Harlem Renaissance.
Inspired in part by her parents' interest in their Sephardic roots in 15th-century Spain, Mirrer took medieval history as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, writing a thesis on the cult of the Virgin Mary. A graduate year studying linguistics at Cambridge, during which she spent a lot of time leaning against a heater ("I had dents in my back, like stigmata," she says), made her think about universities in California.
ON DISPLAY: The Hamilton-Burr dueling pistols, circa 1797, on loan from the JPMorgan Chase Historical Collection.
Stanford was not only relatively dry and warm, she says, "it was paradise, because it was real people thinking about real things." She began work there on what she considers the best of her four books, Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile. Esoteric though her focus might seem, for Mirrer it all connects. "My entire career has been about how history gets told," she says.
She earned her PhD at Stanford in Spanish and humanities. Among her major influences was Jean Franco, a British-born scholar of Latin American literature who then chaired the humanities department. Mirrer's and Franco's shared interest was in how history is presented in literature, with an emphasis on the images of women.
Mirrer went on to teach in the Spanish departments at Fordham University and at the University of Minnesota, where she says she became the "token" female administrator when she was named vice provost for arts, sciences and engineering.
She was surprised at the satisfaction she had in being in a position of authority, and moved on to a larger challenge at the City University of New York, where she was executive vice-chancellor of academic affairs. Her particular interest was in easing students' transition from high school to college. She says her greatest pleasure now as she strolls the historical society's halls is seeing crowds of schoolchildren on weekdays and parents with their children on weekends.
One of the first shows on Mirrer's watch, and her favorite, Slavery in New York, drew a record number of visitors. Museumgoers learned, for example, that 40 percent of colonial New Yorkers owned slaves. During the 1600s and 1700s, New York households relied more on slaves than any other colonial city except Charleston, S.C.
GOOD FIND: Daguerreotype of Caesar, circa 1850, believed to have been the last slave manumitted in New York state.In November, the big show will be Silicon City. The exhibit is subtitled Computer History Made in New York, but it could just as well be It Didn't All Start With Steve Jobs. In fact the inspiration for the show came from a conversation between Mirrer and Walter Isaacson, Jobs's biographer. A major message is how New York, a place that cares about making money, shaped early discoveries in computing. At IBM's Madison Avenue headquarters, executives pushed to get computers out of the lab and into the market.
The writer for the exhibit, Paul Rosenthal, decided to open it with the IBM video from the 1964 World's Fair, which he calls "kind of the coming-out party for computers." Entitled THINK, it got fairgoers excited about the magic of the information machine. The exhibit will pull in Thomas Edison's vacuum tubes; IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, which chugged away in 1948 calculating the positions of the planets; and the famously room-sized ENIAC.
The society has two great treasures for which Mirrer is currently building large permanent exhibition spaces. First is a series of 435 watercolors John James Audubon created in preparation for engraving 433 plates in the series The Birds of America. "These are not just pretty pictures," Mirrer says. "He was mapping the continent, and expansion west, as he mapped the birds." The society purchased them from Audubon's widow in 1863.
The second is a collection of 132 Tiffany lamps donated by an Austrian immigrant and New York orthodontist named Egon Neustadt. An important element of the collection's story is the curators' discovery of Clara Driscoll, a talented artist who, in the early 1900s, oversaw a 35-woman workshop that designed many of the famous lamps credited to Louis Comfort Tiffany.
SHEDDING LIGHT: Dragonfly lamp shade likely designed by Clara Driscoll for Tiffany Studios, pre-1906.Mirrer is passionate about uncovering the stories of other women; the historical society's Center for the Study of Women's History will open in 2016. "I want to ensure that women have a place as a part of history," she explains. Her special interest is in those who came to New York and changed the course of 20th-century history, such as Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement, a historic health-care and social services center, and the Visiting Nurse Service of New York.
Just as museumgoers were shocked to learn that one in five people on the streets of New York in colonial times was a slave, some will find it hard to believe that women in the United States did not have the right to vote until 1920. Such opportunities to become enlightened are part of the reason Mirrer loves her job.
"If I were an academic, I'd be limited to my specialty," Mirrer says. "Here I learn about everything."
Constance Casey, a former editor at the San Jose Mercury News, now lives in New York. She is a contributing editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine, and a new member of the New-York Historical Society.
