In the last year or so, the New-York Historical Society has come under fire from some quarters for a variety of reasons. Critics charge that under the society’s new patronage, which is that of Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, both conservative Republicans, a right-wing bias has seeped into the society’s offerings. Others bemoan that Messrs. Lehrman and Gilder (the latter is an owner of The New York Sun) seek to make the society an institution more dedicated to national rather than local history. Another charge is that the new patrons moved in on a vulnerable institution and have sought to make it a subsidiary of their Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The most visible critics have been Glenn Collins at the New York Times and professor Mike Wallace of CUNY. Mr. Collins writes periodic pieces that are highly skeptical of the society’s mission. Mr. Wallace’s criticisms have more resonance, given that he is the most important historian of New York City. Yet I could not help feeling that when Mr. Wallace produced his magisterial critique of the society’s Alexander Hamilton show of last year, it proved that the society was doing something right: It had come back from the brink of disaster to engender lively debate among learned New Yorkers about one of the principal figures in the early history of the nation and of this city.

What’s more, the society is no stranger to controversy. It is arguable that there has never been a “golden age” of the New-York Historical Society. It is, however, quite possible that its golden age is imminent. Ric Burns, the outstanding documentary filmmaker who made the multipart “New York: A Documentary Film” and who now serves on the board of the historical society, is not one of those doubters. He has produced a brief, half-hour “homage” to the society he loves, intended to serve as a sort of reintroduction of the society to New York citizens, and to celebrate its rebirth.

When one thinks of New York’s great museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Frick Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and perhaps others come to mind. Yet the mother of New York museums is the New-York Historical Society. It is older than the others. It was the first New York institution entitled to be called a museum. For many years, it was the only museum in New York dedicated to establishing permanent collections, and as such was the only institution in the city capable of receiving, caring for, and displaying the private collections bequeathed by New York collectors. For that reason, it went far beyond what anyone nowadays thinks of as a “historical society.”

To most people, a historical society is a musty sort of local antiquarian organization dedicated to the preservation of artifacts and, perhaps, documents relating to a local place’s past. Such societies are often a vital resource for researchers or anyone with an interest in local history. But the New-York Historical Society is that plus so much more.

In recent memory, the New-York Historical Society nearly shut its doors for good. The very thought made some of us cry. It is interesting, though, that in studying the society’s history we see that it has faced that same situation more than once. In 1827, the society escaped ruin only when the state legislature granted it $8,000. In 1899, only nine years before its Central Park West building opened, the press castigated the society for neglect of its collections and for not making them accessible to the public. Indeed, the very birth of the society was a sort of rebirth.

As Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace point out in “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” (Oxford University Press), the society was an outgrowth of the Friendly Club, a looseknit club founded in 1793 by a young New York Hospital physician named Elihu Smith. The club included Smith’s friends, cultural luminaries of the early Republican city, such as James Kent (the future Chancellor Kent), Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, and the theater manager and theater historian William Dunlap.

The Friendly Club held meetings in members’ homes and in taverns to discuss literature, philosophy, and other subjects. The members tended to be deists in religion, and were avidly interested in the European feminist movement. The club disbanded after a few years, feeling it had made little headway against the overwhelming materialism and philistinism of New York life. But in 1804, John Pintard, at the time holder of an office called city inspector, rallied former Friendly Club members and others to form the New-York Historical Society.

Pintard was never a wealthy man but one with a selfless devotion to his city. The society’s stated goal was “to collect and preserve whatever may relate to the natural, civil or ecclesiastical History of the United States in general and of this State in particular.” The founders of the society were that small but remarkably energetic band of cultured New Yorkers who also created or promoted New York Hospital, the Free School Society, the New York Society Library, the American Academy of Fine Arts, and the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, and who promoted the Erie Canal.

The same names pop up over and over again in connection with these things – Pintard, Mitchill, DeWitt Clinton, Dr. David Hosack. For these men, the American Academy of Fine Arts and the Erie Canal were of a piece. Each in its way furthered New York, speaking to different though equally important components of what makes a city great. The New-York Historical Society was a signal endeavor of this ferment – and the longest-lived.

DeWitt Clinton, then mayor, offered the society quarters in City Hall, then on Wall Street. The society moved into its first permanent building in 1857, at Second Avenue and 11th Street. In 1858, it received the Luman Reed collection of contemporary American paintings by Cole, Asher Durand, and others. In 1867, the society received the Thomas J. Bryan collection, including European old masters. The society was the city’s only art museum until the Metropolitan was formed in 1872.

The society moved into its present building, designed by the great York & Sawyer on Central Park West, between 77th and 78th Streets, in 1908. This was a new period of cultural ferment in New York, this time fueled by late 19th-century wealth, which fostered such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Botanical Garden. In 1938, the society added north and south wings by the architects Walker & Gillette.

The Central Park West building would seem to have marked a new dawn for an institution that had for more than a century acquired unexampled collections of both works of art and of library holdings. The new building, however, did not assuage those who felt the society had made itself irrelevant to the changing city. In response, a rival institution, the Museum of the City of New York, came into being.

One of the forces behind the 1923 creation of the new museum, Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, called the New-York Historical Society “a deformed monstrosity filled with curiosities, ill-arranged and badly assorted”- a phrase rather more pungent than anything we have heard from Messrs. Collins or Wallace. Outside studies in 1956 and 1986 took the society severely to task for failing properly to catalog its holdings. As late as 1997, only 30% of the society’s 2 million manuscripts, 650,000 books, 15,000 maps, and 10,000 newspapers had been catalogued.

In the early 1990s, the society faced ruin. There was a great deal of talk that it was going to merge with the Museum of the City of New York. For many, especially those in the media, the merger made great sense. Yet for the New Yorkophiles among us, the merger made no sense at all. New York could support two baseball teams. Why then could we not support two institutions dedicated to chronicling and interpreting our past? We who have for years gone to both the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York have reveled in the differences between the two places.

The two did not merge, thank goodness. And, under Betsy Gotbaum, now New York’s public advocate, the New-York Historical Society began to rebound. The eminent New York historian Kenneth Jackson was the society’s president until fairly recently. Now the president is Louise Mirrer and the director is Linda Ferber, the latter an outstanding historian of American art, late of the Brooklyn Museum. These are not frivolous people.

As the society enters the new century, the interest in New York history is greater than it has ever been. This is due in no small part to the likes of Messrs. Wallace and Burns, who have done so much to kindle wide public interest in New York history. It is a golden moment for the society, which stands poised to gather the strands of its own unique history and weave them into something better than the society has ever been.

Ric Burns’s “The New-York Historical Society: A Celebration” will air Wednesday at 9 p.m. on WNYC-TV.