After More Than a Century, the Upper West Side’s Oldest Museum Just Unveiled Its Biggest Addition Yet

After nearly three years of construction, the largest expansion an Upper West Side institution has attempted in generations is finally open to the public.

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That museum is the New York Historical, and on June 18 it opened the doors of its new Tang Wing for American Democracy, a 71,000-square-foot addition to its landmark home at 170 Central Park West, between West 76th and 77th streets. The timing is no accident: the wing arrives just as the country kicks off its 250th-anniversary celebrations, and the museum is leaning all the way in.

We first shared the opening date back in December, part of the same overhaul that saw the 221-year-old institution drop “Society” from its name. Designed by RAMSA (Robert A.M. Stern Architects), the wing adds gallery space, a rooftop deck, a sculpture court, a state-of-the-art conservation studio, and new classrooms for the museum’s Chang Chavkin Academy for American Democracy, the civics program that brings sixth graders in for four days at a time.

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To welcome visitors, the museum is keeping the lights on late. Hours run until 8 p.m. on Thursdays through Saturdays from June 18 to July 4, and admission during those evening stretches is pay-as-you-wish from 5 to 8 p.m.

There’s plenty to fill those hours. “Songs of America,” a live music series produced with Jazz at Lincoln Center, threads Revolutionary-era tunes, blues, classic jazz, soul jazz, and Americana across the opening weeks — free with pay-as-you-wish admission during the extended evening hours. A rare broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence, long held in the museum’s collection but only recently studied, is on temporary view from June 18 to July 5; scholars now believe it was printed by colonial New York printer Samuel Loudon in the weeks after July 4, 1776.

A pair of marquee conversations round out the lineup: filmmaker Ken Burns joins David M. Rubenstein on June 25 to discuss the PBS series “The American Revolution,” and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin sits down with Rubenstein on June 28 for a talk on leadership at the nation’s 250th. Families get their own days, too, with summer socials on June 21 and June 28 and free admission for kids under 18 on July 4.

The whole celebration builds to a genuinely theatrical finale. On July 9 — the anniversary of the day the Declaration was read aloud to New Yorkers in 1776, prompting a crowd to topple a statue of King George III at Bowling Green — the museum will stage a ceremonial pull-down of a life-size replica of that very equestrian statue. Fragments of the original will be on display nearby.

Among the wing’s permanent draws is the Stuart and Jane Weitzman Shoe Museum, with more than 100 pairs of historic shoes tracing American women’s history, a case of “fantasy shoes,” and a rotating celebrity display that opens with the long-running collaboration between Stuart Weitzman and Beyoncé. New semiquincentennial exhibitions include “Democracy Matters,” “Revolutionary Women,” “Old Masters, New Amsterdam,” and “House Made of Dawn,” a show of Native American art drawn from the collection of board chair Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang.

The wing will eventually house one more institution: the American LGBTQ+ Museum, now slated to open in 2028.

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