History
A society was founded in November 20, 1804, largely through the efforts of John Pintard, who for a select few years was secretary of the American Academy of Fine Arts, when well as a founder of Up to date York's number one lower cost bank. He was besides among the 1st to agitate for a loose school formulas. A 1st meeting comprised eleven of the city's large citizens, including City manager DeWitt Clinton. At the meeting, the committee was selected to draw higher a constitution, & by December 10, the society was officially organized.

Within 1813, nine years after its introduction whenever a society's number 1 catalogue wwhen printed, a society owned 4,265 books, likewise as 234 volumes of United States documents, 119 almanacs, 1Thirty titles of newspapers, 134 maps, & 30 miscellaneous views. It got already collected the begin of a manuscript collection, many oil portraits, & 38 graven portraits.

A society suffered under heavily debt in the period of its early decades. Within 1809, the society organized the celebration of the 200th day of remembrance of the arrival of Henry Hudson in New York Harbor. Divine per event, a society petitioned & late found an endowment from either a New York State Legislature, to be financed by the lottery within 1814. a failure of the lottery resulted inside a debt, forcing the society to mortage a select few of its books, which were saved sole within 1823.

A society & its collections moved often in a period of the 19th century. Within 1809, the society & its collections moved to the Government Home in Bowling Green,which had been constructed as a home for the President of the United States, but which was untenanted fallowing a relocation of the capital to Philadelphia. Around 1816, a society moved once again to the Future York Institutiin, erst the city almshouse on City Hall Park. Around 1857, it moved into a number one buidling constructed specifically for its collections, at a so-fashionable intersection of 2nd Avenue & 11th Street, in which it stayed for the next fifty years. the society late acquired a collection of Egyptian and Assyrian art which was later transferred to the Brooklyn Museum. A central part of the present building in Central Park West was completed in 1908.

A society's collection continued to develop throughout a 20th century, but renewed fiscal woes in the 1970s and 1980s forced the society in the early 1990s to limit access to its collections to sales person research worker. Around 1995, grants from a city & state restored public access under a counsel of Betsy Gotbaum. Recently personal grants stand allowed a society to commence building an in-line catalog of its collections.