问答题 To a passer-by, the familiar building on the comer of 77th Street in New York, which is a formal and inexpressive box, suggests very little about its occupant. To anyone who knows the nature of the Historical Society, however, who have ventured inside the bronze doors and climbed a flight of wide marble stairs to visit the stately library, closed behind tall doors, or has looked, even at random, through one of the card catalogues along a back wall, it is the organization that first institutionalized the concept of historic preservation in New York.
The New York Historical Society is the mother of the city"s cultural institutions. It was founded in 1804—sixty-five years before the American Museum of Natural History, sixty-six years before the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ninety-one before the New York Public Library—at a time when the nation was barely three decades old and only eccentric were collecting American artifacts and ephemera. New York was a provincial town in 1804, and as it grew, the Society, its self-appointed annotator, moved seven times to keep pace with its acquisitions before it settled on the sleepy Upper West Side and, in 1908, erected a pink granite building as a permanent home.