About the New York State Museum
The New York State Museum began in 1836 as the New York State Geological and Natural History Survey, commissioned by Governor William Marcy to catalog the state's mineral resources. Reorganized as a museum in 1870, it is the oldest and largest state museum in the country and has employed some of the nation's founding figures in paleontology, ethnology, botany and mycology. It is a program of the State Education Department's Office of Cultural Education, which is why its address ends in nysed.gov.
Since 1976 the museum has occupied the first four floors of the Cultural Education Center at the southern end of the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, with 100,000 square feet of exhibition space. Long-term galleries include the Ice Ages of New York (home of the Cohoes Mastodon), a Haudenosaunee longhouse and exhibits on the state's Native peoples, Adirondack Hall, and "The World Trade Center: Rescue, Recovery, Response," the museum's September 11 collection. A working carousel built between 1912 and 1916 is a fixture for families. Several temporary exhibitions open each year; the 2026 schedule includes "Revolutionary New York" for the nation's 250th, "Berenice Abbott: Changing New York," "Timbuctoo: Gerrit Smith's Experiment," on the abolitionist who deeded 120,000 acres to 3,000 free Black men so they could meet New York's property qualification to vote, and the Oechsle Clock Collection in Adirondack Hall.
Collections and Research Services
The research collections exceed 16 million scientific specimens and about one million cultural objects, organized under Archaeology, Biology, Ethnography, Geology, History and Paleontology. Curators and scientists run active research programs, and the collections are made available to outside scholars by arrangement with the relevant division; each division's page on the website lists a contact. This is a museum rather than a genealogical library, so a family historian will find the most use in the History collections (political, social and labor history, photographs and objects documenting New York communities) and in the Historical Archaeology holdings, which include material from excavated house lots and burial grounds across the state. Recent additions reported by the museum include Haudenosaunee beadwork, contemporary Mohican basketry and a wartime labor portrait of George Williams. For records of people rather than things, begin with our guides to free family history research and old city directories, both of which point to the New York sources held elsewhere in Albany.
Planning Your Visit
The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and closed Mondays and state-observed holidays. Admission is free, with a suggested donation of $5 per person or $10 per family. Enter from Madison Avenue; the concourse entrance is closed. Parking in the Madison Avenue Lot on the west side of the building costs $10 on weekdays and is free after 2:00 p.m. and all day on weekends, with further visitor parking in the P-3 lot beneath the Empire State Plaza concourse. Bags larger than 16 by 12 by 6 inches must go in the free lockers. Wheelchairs and strollers are available at the lobby desk, and the Carousel Café on the second-floor mezzanine serves breakfast and lunch. Check nysm.nysed.gov for closures and current exhibitions. For county-level records in the Capital District, the Rensselaer County Historical Society in Troy and the Schenectady County Historical Society are each a short drive away.
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