Hudson River Museum

Last updated
Hudson River Museum
Hudson River Museum 5BBC jeh.jpg
Hudson River Museum
Established1919
Location511 Warburton Avenue
Yonkers, New York
Coordinates 40°57′14″N73°53′47″W / 40.9540°N 73.8963°W / 40.9540; -73.8963
Type Art museum, Planetarium [1]
DirectorMasha Turchinsky
CuratorLaura Vookles,
Chair, Curatorial
Public transit access Glenwood station
Website www.hrm.org

The Hudson River Museum, located in Trevor Park in Yonkers, New York, is the largest museum in Westchester County. [2] The Yonkers Museum, founded in 1919 at City Hall, became the Hudson River Museum in 1948. While often considered an art museum by the public, due to the extensive collection of Hudson River School paintings, the museum also features exhibits on the history, science and heritage of the region.

Contents

History

Glenview Mansion Hudson River Museum 02.JPG
Glenview Mansion

Founded in 1919 as the Yonkers Museum, the facility was also known as the Yonkers Museum of Science and the Arts, [3] prior to being named the Hudson River Museum. The museum originally contained a number of mineral specimens housed in Yonkers City Hall. Photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr., a lifelong resident of Yonkers, played a key role in the creation of the museum, [4] as did sculptor Isidore Konti, [5] [6] and George J. Stengel. [7]

Central to its history is the Glenview Mansion, a house built in 1877 from a design by American architect Charles W. Clinton, and once the home of one John Bond Trevor. [8] Home of the museum for 45 years from 1929, [3] the house now forms a large part of the Hudson River Museum. It contains six period rooms displaying furniture and decor from that era. In 1972 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, a mark of excellence it has maintained since 1974. [9] The rooms on public display feature carved woodwork by Philadelphia cabinetmaker Daniel Pabst.

In 1979, artist Red Grooms created and installed "The Bookstore" at Hudson River Museum, where it is on permanent display. [10] [11] [12]

The museum is the home of the Andrus Planetarium, the only public planetarium in Westchester County. [13] It added the planetarium in 1969 to celebrate the beginning of the Space Age and the increasing interest in space. [14] The planetarium was one part of the museum's expansion throughout the 1960s, [15] which also included the construction of larger and more modern facilities to house its collections, followed by the restoration of the ground floor of the Glenview house to its 19th-century condition. [16] [17] The planetarium and its laser shows are credited with driving the museum's 30% increase in attendance in the early 1990s. [18]

The museum's diversity is part of what led to its citation as one of the most unusual cultural facilities by the New York State Council on the Arts in 1972. [19] It has sought to maintain this diversity amidst changes in leadership and focus throughout its history. [20] The diversity is apparent in the museum's 23-acre (9.3 ha) site, on which a 2006 expansion attempted to better join the Glenview Mansion with the modern 1969 additions. [21]

The museum used its namesake, the Hudson River, as the core of its 75th anniversary celebration in 1994. [22] It celebrated its centennial in 2019. [23] [24]

In March 2014, the museum completed a renovation of the planetarium and installed a new Megastar which is capable of displaying up to 22 million stars compared to its Zeiss projector which displayed up to 5,000 stars.

Since 1995 the museum has offered a Junior Docent Program; the program was recognized by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities with a Coming Up Taller Award in 2008. [25] [26]

In November 2020, the museum broke ground on an expansion project, adding a 12,000 sq ft (1,100 m2) wing to the campus. The new West Wing debuted in June 2023 [27] [28] and houses special exhibition spaces overlooking the Hudson River, a 100-seat auditorium, a Community and Partnership Gallery, and art storage space, also allowing the museum to display more of its permanent collection. [2]

The museum's Glenview Mansion appears in HBO's series The Gilded Age , an American historical drama television series created by Julian Fellowes, which premiered in January 2022. [29]

Funding

The late 1980s was a difficult time for the Hudson River Museum when it faced a decrease in funding, uncertainties in future funding, and a high level of staff turnover. [30] The museum was forced to reduce its operating hours and cut some programming, but was able to expand the planetarium. [3] [31] [32] The facility experienced a resurgence in the 1990s, received a number of grants and awards, saw increased funding from Westchester County, and was able to expand in time for its 75th anniversary. The museum also saw its attendance almost double from 55,000 to 100,000 between 1990 and 1994. [3] The late 1990s saw a downturn in funding and the museum was again forced to face significant cutbacks. [33] In the wake of these cutbacks, the museum began to host private events and offer tours, particularly to groups of school children, as a means of increasing income. [34]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Westchester County, New York</span> County in New York, United States

Westchester County is located in the U.S. state of New York. It is the seventh most populous county in the State of New York and the most populous north of New York City. According to the 2020 United States Census, the county had a population of 1,004,456, its highest decennial count ever and an increase of 55,344 (5.8%) from the 949,113 counted in 2010. Located in the Hudson Valley, Westchester covers an area of 450 square miles (1,200 km2), consisting of six cities, 19 towns, and 23 villages. Established in 1683, Westchester was named after the city of Chester, England. The county seat is the city of White Plains, while the most populous municipality in the county is the city of Yonkers, with 211,569 residents per the 2020 U.S. Census.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yonkers, New York</span> City in New York, United States

Yonkers is a city in Westchester County, New York, United States. The city, a core suburb of the New York Metropolitan Area had a population of 211,569 as of the 2020 United States Census. It is classified as an inner suburb of New York City, located directly to the north of the Bronx and approximately 2.4 miles (4 km) north of Marble Hill, the northernmost point in Manhattan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hudson River School</span> American art movement

The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. Early on, the paintings typically depicted the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Westchester Community College</span> Community college in New York, United States

Westchester Community College (WCC) is a public community college in Valhalla, New York, in Westchester County. It is part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sprain Brook Parkway</span> North–south parkway in Westchester County, New York

The Sprain Brook Parkway is a 12.65-mile (20.36 km) controlled-access parkway in Westchester County, New York, United States. It begins at an interchange with the Bronx River Parkway in the city of Yonkers, and ends at the former site of the Hawthorne Circle, where it merges into the Taconic State Parkway. The parkway serves an alternate to the Bronx River Parkway, boasting an interchange connection through western Westchester with Interstate 287. New York's Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) refers to it internally as New York State Route 987F (NY 987F), an unsigned reference route.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Getty Square</span> Public square in Yonkers, New York

Getty Square is the name for downtown Yonkers, New York, centered on the public square. Getty Square is the civic center, central business district, and transit hub of the City of Yonkers. A dense and growing residential area, it is located in southern Westchester County, New York. The square is named after prominent 19th-century merchant Robert Getty.

James Renwick Brevoort was an American artist known for his landscapes painted in the Hudson River School style.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isidore Konti</span> American sculptor

Isidore Konti was a Vienna-born sculptor. He began formal art studies at the age of 16 when he entered the Imperial Academy in Vienna, where he studied under Edmund von Hellmer. In 1886, he won a scholarship that allowed him to study in Rome for two years. While there he developed a love of Renaissance art that was to affect the nature of his mature sculpture. Upon returning to Austria, Konti worked as an architectural modeler.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saw Mill River</span> River in the United States of America

The Saw Mill River is a 23.5-mile (37.8 km) tributary of the Hudson River in Westchester County, New York, United States. It flows from an unnamed pond north of Chappaqua to Getty Square in Yonkers, where it empties into the Hudson as that river's southernmost tributary. It is the only major stream in southern Westchester County to drain into the Hudson instead of Long Island Sound. It drains an area of 26.5 square miles (69 km2), most of it heavily developed suburbia. For 16 miles (26 km), it flows parallel to the Saw Mill River Parkway, a commuter artery, an association that has been said to give the river an "identity crisis."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Science Barge</span>

The Science Barge is a floating urban farm and environmental education center that has been docked in Yonkers, New York, USA since late 2008. The Barge grows crops using a hydroponic greenhouse powered by solar panels, wind turbines, and biofuels. The crops in the greenhouse are irrigated by captured rainwater and desalinated river water. Food is grown without carbon emissions, no agricultural waste is discharged into the watershed and no pesticides are used. The Science Barge is also a public education tool and hosts school groups from Westchester, New York City and the greater New York area visiting during the week, and the general public on weekends. From 2006–2008, the Science Barge docked for periods of two months at each of six stops along the Manhattan waterfront with the goal of educating the public on urban sustainable agriculture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pace University</span> Private university in the New York metropolitan area

Pace University is a private university with three campuses in New York: Pace University in New York City, Pace University in Pleasantville, and Pace Law in White Plains. It was established in 1906 as a business school by the brothers Homer St. Clair Pace and Charles A. Pace. Pace enrolls about 13,000 students as of fall 2021 in bachelor's, master's and doctoral programs.

Ingleside is an American country house overlooking the Hudson River in Dobbs Ferry, New York. It is one of only three survivors of the Gothic Revival "Hudson River castles" built in the mid-nineteenth century, in the now "heavily suburbanized strip" between Riverdale, north of Manhattan, and North Tarrytown. There were at least eighteen villas with picturesque "manor house" details on this reach of the Hudson, as well as two full-blown châteaux: Strawberry Hill, Irvington and Glenview, Yonkers. Ingleside was built in 1854-57 for the English immigrant Edwin B. Strange, a silk importer in New York City, who commissioned its design from Alexander Jackson Davis, the pre-eminent American architect of picturesque villas with Gothic Revival detailing. Much of the original crenellations have been removed over the years, but the stuccoed villa still stands, housing St. Christopher's School, Dobbs Ferry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Glenview Mansion</span> Historic house in New York, United States

Glenview Mansion, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the John Bond Trevor House, is located on Warburton Avenue in Yonkers, New York, United States. It is a stone house erected during the 1870s in an eclectic Late Victorian architectural style from a design by Charles W. Clinton. It was listed on the Register in 1972.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philipse Manor Hall State Historic Site</span> Historic house in New York, United States

Philipse Manor Hall State Historic Site is a historic house museum located in the Getty Square neighborhood of Yonkers, New York. Originally the family seat of Philipse Manor, it is Westchester County's second oldest standing building after the Timothy Knapp House. Located near the Hudson River at Warburton Avenue and Dock Street, it is owned and operated by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

The YoHo Artist Community works out of two of the Alexander Smith Carpet Mills Historic District buildings, located at 540 and 578 Nepperhan Avenue in Yonkers, New York. This population of artists and crafters has grown to more than 80 working artists since 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr.</span> American photographer

Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. was an American pictorialist photographer, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was one of the first Americans to be admitted to the Linked Ring, and his photographs won dozens of medals at exhibitions around the world in the 1890s and early 1900s. He was famous among his contemporaries for his portraits of high-society women, most notably model and singer Evelyn Nesbit. Eickemeyer's best-known photographs are now part of the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.

There are numerous nationally and locally designated historic sites and attractions in Westchester County. These include architecturally significant manors and estates, churches, cemeteries, farmhouses, African-American heritage sites, and underground railroad depots and waystations. There are sites from pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary times, as well as battlegrounds. Westchester County also played an important role in the development of the modern suburb, and there are many associated heritage sites and museums.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Newington-Cropsey Foundation</span>

The Newington-Cropsey Foundation (NCF) is a nonprofit private organization based in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. The foundation's aim is to maintain and preserve the works of Jasper Cropsey and the art movement he was a part of, the Hudson River School. The foundation also promotes representational painting and sculpture.

Barbara Segal is a sculptor and stone carver based in Yonkers, New York.

The Hudson Valley Writer Center is a non-profit literary arts organization in Philipsburg Manor, Sleepy Hollow, NY. It was established on August 5, 1988, by Margo Taft Stever, a Sleepy Hollow poet, with the assistance of the Westchester Council of Arts, and moved into its permanent home at the Philipse Manor Railroad Station in 1996. The center hosts over 40 readings by poets, fiction and non-fiction authors, and playwrights over the course of a year, as well as popular recurring monthly events like Open Mic. They also offer workshops and guest readings and publish chapbooks annually under its imprint, Slapering Hol Press.

References

  1. ↑ "Hudson River Museum: About". ARTINFO. 2008. Retrieved 2008-07-28.[ permanent dead link ]
  2. 1 2 "New York's Hudson River Museum will break ground on a major expansion". 16 November 2020.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Roberta Hershenson (1994-12-04). "Grants Cheer Hudson River Museum". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  4. ↑ https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-my-studio-rudolf-eickemeyer-jr-and-the-art-of-the-camera-1885-1930/oclc/15683645 [ bare URL ]
  5. ↑ "Isidore Konti & Paul Manship - Hudson River Museum — Google Arts & Culture".
  6. ↑ "Yonkers Art Association printed material, 1920-1966 | Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution".
  7. ↑ "George J. Stengel 1866-1937: New Hope Impressions".
  8. ↑ Panetta, Roger G. Westchester: The American Suburb. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006
  9. ↑ "Accredited Museums".
  10. ↑ Shirey, David L. (13 May 1979). "'The Bookstore,' Red Grooms Style". The New York Times.
  11. ↑ Bland, Bartholomew F. (2008). Red Grooms: In the Studio & the Bookstore. Hudson River Museum. ISBN   9780943651361.
  12. ↑ "Grooving with Grooms in Yonkers". The New York Times. 4 March 1979.
  13. ↑ "The Andrus Planetarium". The New York Times. 1988-09-25. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  14. ↑ John Canaday (1969-11-15). "Hudson River Museum Adds Space". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  15. ↑ Joseph P. Fried (1967-07-02). "Old Museum to Get a Modern Addition". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  16. ↑ "Art in Westchester from Private Collection". Hudson River Museum. Retrieved 1 May 2017– via Google Books.
  17. ↑ Kate Stone Lombardi (2003-11-09). "Oh, the Places You'll See! Right Here". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  18. ↑ Roberta Hershenson (1993-01-31). "How the Neuberger is Bidding for More Attention". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  19. ↑ George Goodman Jr. (1972-05-26). "Unusual Hudson River Museum Cited". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  20. ↑ Tessa Melvin (1989-06-11). "Hudson Museum Names New Chief". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  21. ↑ Elsa Brenner (2006-06-04). "Melding Victorian and Brutalist Styles". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  22. ↑ "Happy Anniversary, Hudson River Museum". The New York Times. 1994-07-10. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  23. ↑ "Hudson River Museum's Centennial: Westchester's One and Only 100-Year Old Museum | ArtsWestchester". 27 June 2019.
  24. ↑ "Hudson River Museum's Centennial: Looking to the Future by Embracing the Past | ArtsWestchester". 2 July 2019.
  25. ↑ Hershenson, Roberta (25 May 2008). "Inside a Museum, It's Cool". The New York Times.
  26. ↑ "MRS. Bush's Remarks at the 2007 Coming up Taller Awards Ceremony".
  27. ↑ "Connecting Is Key to Hudson River Museum's New Wing". 3 July 2023.
  28. ↑ "HUDSON RIVER MUSEUM SOARS INTO NEXT PHASE WITH NEW WEST WING". 25 July 2023.
  29. ↑ "Westchester in the Spotlight as HBO's The Gilded Age Premieres Jan. 24".
  30. ↑ Tessa Melvin (1989-01-08). "Director's Post Empty Again at Hudson River Museum". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  31. ↑ Tessa Melvin (1987-05-10). "New Director Hired at the Hudson River Museum". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  32. ↑ Tessa Melvin (1987-01-18). "Hudson River Museum Cuts Services". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  33. ↑ David Scharfenberg (2006-03-12). "Less for Medicaid, More for Museums". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
  34. ↑ Elsa Brenner (1997-11-30). "Arts Centers Open Doors for Hire to Survive". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.