Bird Massacre On Central Park West.

In an act of cultural vandalism somewhere between re-making the movie Sabrina and burning the library of Alexandria, someone has gotten their hands on The New York Historical Society. I don’t know who (probably just as well) but under the guise of a three-year, seventy-million dollar renovation, they’ve taken a minor museum and turned it into a major waste of real estate. In the process, New York’s foremost avian treasure, like the bird population over an English estate, has been muscled nearly out of existence.

The New York Historical Society never had much to recommend it. There’s the colonial-era portrait of a New York State Governor in complete drag. A novelty, at best, but, I’m willing to bet, one-of-a-kind. It also has a beautiful research library (more about that later.) Any distinction that it enjoys is derived from two things: its enviable location and John James Audubon’s Birds of America. The former is still there, the latter, like a peacock feather, is a pathetic reminder of something glorious.

Commanding the northeast corner of Seventy-Seventh Street and Central Park West, The New York Historical Society has, not one, but two panoramic – and protected – views of Manhattan. In the heart, yet, of one of the city's most prestigious, residential neighborhoods. A parcel of real estate worth, conservatively, eighty-two jillion dollars. To put it in perspective, the new building at Sixty-Second Street and CPW, where billionaires fight to buy forty-million dollar apartments, has a good, but not great location. Only a few blocks away, The Time-Warner Towers, which also have apartments in that price range, are located above a shopping mall at a traffic circle.

Not that its prime location is completely wasted on The New York Historical Society. The main reason it draws more visitors than the Museum of the City of New York is because the latter is rather too far north at Fifth Avenue and One Hundred and Third Street. (Unless, of course, you live in Harlem or work at Mount Sinai Hospital.) The Society, in other words, plays NYU to the City Museum’s Columbia University.

The Historical Society owns all 435 of the original watercolors by John James Audubon on which he based the prints in Birds of America. Prior to the renovation, they took pride of place in one of the major galleries. Though never displayed all at once, a great many more were visible than today. Currently, a mere five Audubon paintings can be seen in a niche across from the toilets in a corridor devoted exclusively to . . . toilets. I might be able to understand such a dismal priority if the rest of the building was filled with masterpieces. It isn’t - not by a long shot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a huge Audubon fan nor am I a bird lover, but I think the work of an authentic American genius deserves better than being shoved in a corner next to some tourist squirting out the day’s soft pretzels, hot dogs and other fare.

The museum’s visitors also deserve better than to be frog-marched out of the library like they were caught climbing a fence. Apparently, one’s fifteen dollar admission fee no longer covers admiring the library’s stained-glass windows, paintings, columns and carved panels. Instead, registering for research is the sine qua non. Without it, you will be treated like an illegal immigrant. In Arizona. I remember a different policy. I also remember a larger room, but I can’t be sure because I wasn’t there long enough.