0.10 Chapter eight: facing tough choices today  (Page 5/11)

The reason for highlighting this distinction between impressions and reality is to show that the process of changing the Society's image has not been, and will not be, easy. A successful public program, whether it is an exhibit, a lecture series, or an educational initiative, is expensive to mount. More important, for such a program to have any chance of fundamentally altering the Society's reputation, it must be sustained. The Society's history is dotted with successful exhibits and programs that were hailed in press articles in which the Society was congratulated for finally opening its doors and shedding its stodgy image. Sadly, when contro­versy reappears, the positive characterizations disappear, and the Society is rela­beled with its traditional and more notorious reputation.

It is clear that an attempt to overcome this bias will require substantial in­vestments over a long period of time, with no guarantee of success. Past efforts have failed. The widely held perception that the Society has not attempted to en­gage the public is based on the assumption that the problem is one of supply— that the Society has simply not attempted to make available the kinds of programs the public wants. What has not been acknowledged, however, is that the prob­lem may really be more one of demand. Perhaps the Society's collections, no mat­ter how intelligently they are displayed, simply cannot compete with the myriad of options available to tourists and New Yorkers looking for cultural enrichment or other entertainment. After all, how popular is history? If the Society's failings are more a question of demand, substantial investments to improve the Society's reputation carry a very high degree of risk.

Multiple purposes

Ever since the 1850s, when the first major art collections were donated to the N-YHS, it has been difficult for the Society to achieve a balance between the com­peting demands of the museum and the library. In the Society's early years, it was a battle for display and storage space. These battles continue even as the Society's building is being renovated. Additional complexity has been added in recent years as the Society has moved to step up its educational and public programming.

In any era, such tensions would be difficult to manage, but it seems that they are even more so today. In the early 1940s, for example, when the costs of run­ning the Society were more modest, Alexander Wall explained that the Society's library could not exist without the museum. He implied that the museum was a kind of cash cow that would pay for the library. He said, "The scholarship part of the historical society's work would be likely to have a bare cupboard if not coupled with a popular museum." Today, there are no cash cows. Museums also struggle to raise the money needed to balance their budgets. No museum would want a portion of the money generated by its exhibits and collections to be siphoned off to finance another programmatic activity (in this case a library) that is unable to sustain itself.