Skyscrapers are a familiar feature of New York’s busy Financial District, which stretches down to Manhattan’s southern tip where Battery Park offers views across the waters to the Statue of Liberty. A perhaps more surprising attraction amid all this commerce is an outpost of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) at Bowling Green, the city’s first public park, established in 1733. On the other side of the Green from the famous bronze Charging Bull, the grand Beaux Arts Custom House, built in 1902-1907 for the Port of New York’s duty collections, is now home to the George Gustav Heye Center.
Its namesake formed the collection that is at the heart of the NMAI, at both its Washington, DC, and this Manhattan location. Heye (1874-1957), who worked on nearby Wall Street, was keen to build a large and varied collection of artefacts from across the Americas, and to establish a museum to showcase them. He started his collection in 1903, travelling widely and sponsoring excavations in regions that had not yet seen much archaeological research. He did indeed collect a large number of artefacts (including some fakes), but there are reports of illegal excavations of ancient cemeteries, as well as a certain amount of guesswork, leading to inaccurate records that still pose challenges to the NMAI’s curators today.
Thirty years after Heye’s death, the Heye Foundation and the Smithsonian signed an agreement to move the collection to the NMAI, and in 1994 the Gustav Heye Center, the museum’s first facility, opened, with the museum in Washington following a decade later. Curators have been working to fill the gaps left in Heye’s records, return some artefacts, commission new works, and reinterpret old objects. In Manhattan, some of the results of this ongoing work can be seen in the permanent exhibition Infinity of Nations: art and history in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2010.
