In order to be able to welcome more visitors and to offer them a compelling narrative of American history, the New-York Historical Society is embarking on a three-year, $55-million renovation of its galleries, entrance, and façade.

The renovation will allow for easier traffic flow into and out of the building and will create space for a new ground-floor permanent installation related to New York City and the Founders. The renovation will also create a restaurant, an updated auditorium, and a children’s center on the lower level.

“What we inherited was a building that was really built for quite a different set of purposes,” the society’s president, Louise Mirrer, said in an interview of the need for the renovation. “Since 1937” — when the final wings were added — “the building hasn’t evolved physically.

From its founding in 1804 until the early 20th century, the New-York Historical Society was a private-membership organization. Even after it opened to the public in 1908, for many years its leadership was uninterested in attracting a wide swath of New York City residents to the museum. That attitude changed in the 1990s, under the leadership of Betsy Gotbaum, when the society began receiving significant public funding.

In recent years, highly successful exhibitions on such subjects as slavery in New York, New York and the Civil War, and Alexander Hamilton have demonstrated the society’s potential to lure large audiences, and the need to reconfigure the space to accommodate them. Annual attendance is currently 250,000, up from around 100,000 in 2000. Ms. Mirrer said that she expects attendance to double in the next five years.

“A museum shouldn’t just be for the elites — it should be out there trying to communicate to as wide a group of New Yorkers and tourists” as possible, the society’s chairman (and an owner of this newspaper), Roger Hertog, said.

The goal, Mr. Hertog said, is to make the society pre-eminent in telling what he called the American story. With the renovation, “[w]e’re clearing the stage,” he said, “making a platform that can be used not only to increase the number of visitors but also to better tell that story using the Web, using the auditorium for debates and conferences, and telling that story to children and parents.”

As the New York Times reported last month, the society has effectively dropped a plan, which it pursued for more than a year and a half, to build a $100 million, 23-story condominium and annex on an adjacent empty lot. The plan was opposed by many of the society’s neighbors, but Ms. Mirrer said that the society’s decision “had nothing to do with” the controversy.

“We’re very focused on the project at hand, which is going to be transformative in and of itself,” Ms. Mirrer said.

Mr. Hertog, meanwhile, left the possibility for future development open a crack. “As I’ve said, right now we have no plans for any development, and at this moment we don’t have plans to have plans. What will happen in the future is another discussion.”

The society has already raised $62 million for the renovation and plans to raise another $13 million to $18 million to bolster the endowment. The city and state have contributed approximately one-third of the funds; the other two-thirds came from private donations.

The new first-floor gallery will be called the Robert and Clarice Smith New York Gallery of American History after its principal donors. The exhibition will focus on the founding era as an age of experimentation, Ms. Mirrer said. “We want to provoke people to think about the fragility of the [young] nation, how uncertain it was, and how long it took to work out a lot of the debates of the period.”

The exhibition will include busts and death masks of the Founders from the society’s collection; portraits of other historical figures, including Frederick Douglass and Dred Scott, and objects such as child-size slave shackles from around 1800 (from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, on loan to the society). At kiosks, visitors will be able to use a technology called “Turning the Pages,” developed by the British Library, to examine virtual replicas of historical documents and listen to related audio commentary.

The renovated auditorium will run a film introducing the society and its collections, which has been commissioned from the filmmaker Donna Lawrence, who made a similar film for the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

The renovation is scheduled to be completed by the fall of 2011. The museum will stay open for the first two years of construction. In the final year, it will collaborate on joint programs with El Museo del Barrio, at the latter’s location on Fifth Avenue and 104th Street.

The society is heavily programmed for the next two years, with exhibitions this fall on Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and on the New York debate over the ratification of the Constitution, and a show, “Drawn by New York,” featuring selections from the society’s extensive collection of drawings and watercolors. Next fall, it will host another expected blockbuster, “Lincoln and New York.”

In November, the society will also host the first in an ongoing series of lectures and debates on constitutional history. Mr. Hertog and Ms. Mirrer hinted that November’s speaker would be prominent in the field, but said that announcing a name would be premature.

In the meantime, the society is experimenting with ways of establishing more of a presence in the rest of the city. As a pilot project, it has installed two 7-foot-tall placards on the street in Astor Place: one showing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, who gave a famous speech at Cooper Union during his 1860 presidential campaign, the other a portrait of Peter Cooper, the industrialist and politician. The society hopes to bring the program back and expand it for next year’s 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival on Manhattan.