Visiting the New York Historical Society

Recently, we headed up to visit The New-York Historical Society’s museum which just happens to be the oldest New York City museum.

 

This was our first visit to the museum so I was thrilled to find a world-class collection of Hudson River School paintings, including major works by Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church as well as John James Audubon’s extant preparatory watercolors for Birds of America. As you can imagine, the museum has an encyclopedic collection that ranges from folk art to furniture and household accessories  that date back hundreds of years.

DiMenna Children’s History Museum

And if you have older kids (ages 8-13),  it’s the perfect age to visit the  DiMenna Children’s History museum which is aimed at bringing American History to life

The DiMenna Children’s History Museum focuses on the life stories of a diverse selection of youngsters who lived in New York City from the late seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Featured in individual pavilions are Cornelia van Varick (ca. 1692–1734), the daughter of the Dutch merchant Margrieta van Varick; Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804), the teenaged West Indian immigrant who became the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury; James McCune Smith (1813–1865), the African Free School student and first African American medical doctor; Esteban Bellán (1849–1932), the Cuban teenager and first Latin American to play baseball in the U. S.; the children who rode the orphan trains from New York City to rural areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the newsboys and girls who sold newspapers on the city streets in the twentieth century.

We visited the museum of July 4th which was a great way to celebrate independence day to learn about what life was like in 1776. We even got to meet “Ben Franklin”.

As if that wasn’t enough we got a lesson on the History of Ice Cream. Come experience popular flavors of the past and help us crank up batches of 18th and 19th century ice cream recipes. Families will experience both familiar flavors like mint, and unfamiliar flavors like orange flower water; use a historic ice cream crank, and then taste test the results!

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West at 77th Street
New York, NY 10024
Website: www.nyhistory.org

Phone (212) 873-3400

Disclosure: NYC Single Mom was not compensated for this post.