Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum at the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 Smithsonian Institution museums and one of three Smithsonian facilities located in New York City, along with the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center in Bowling Green and the Archives of American Art New York Research Center in the Flatiron District. Unlike other Smithsonian museums, Cooper Hewitt charges an admissions fee. It is the only museum in the United States devoted to historical and contemporary design. Its collections and exhibitions explore design aesthetic and creativity from throughout the United States' history. Early history In 1895, several granddaughters of the politician and businessman Peter Cooper, Sarah Cooper Hewitt, Eleanor Garnier Hewitt and Amy Hewitt Green, asked the Cooper Union college in New York City for space to create a Museum for the Arts of Decoration. The museum would take its inspiration from the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris and would serve as a place for Cooper Union students and professional designers to study decorative arts collections. Cooper Union's trustees provided the fourth floor of the Foundation Building. It opened in 1897 as the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration. The museum was free and open to the public three days a week. The Hewitt sisters donated some of the objects that they owned to the museum. Early in the museum's history, the Cooper Union Museum received three textile collections from J. P. Morgan and drawings by Giovanni Baglione. The three sisters served as directors of the Museum until Sarah Cooper Hewitt died in 1930. After her death, four directors were appointed to run the museum. Constance P. Hare served as chair. In 1938, Edwin S. Burdell became the director of the Cooper Union. The museum became his responsibility. The board of directors was abolished and an advisory council was established. Through the mid-20th century, the museum's collection came to include furniture, wallpapers, leatherwork, millinery, ceramics, jewelry, textiles, and media such as drawings and prints. The museum had begun to decline by the 1950s and 1960s, in part because it was in a hard-to-find location, and Cooper Union students preferred modern art over the museum's dated collections. Threats of closure By the 1960s, the museum and college started to distance themselves from one another in regards to programming. Other departments of the Cooper Union were making financial demands. The Cooper Union announced in June 1963 that it was considering shuttering the museum completely, and the museum closed on July 3, 1963. In explaining the closure, the college said that the museum was far from other visitor attractions, the museum space was too small, and it was seeing declining use. Cooper Union officials also said their endowment could not fund the museum's continued operations. This prompted concerns that the museum's collection could be dispersed. A Committee to Save the Cooper Union Museum, formed by Henry Francis Du Pont, threatened to sue to prevent the museum from closing. The committee requested that the Cooper Union's trustees split the museum off from the college's main operations. Another organization, the Greenwich Village Committee, was also formed in July 1963 to try to prevent the proposed relocation of the museum's collections. The museum reopened September 16, 1963, with its future still uncertain. That November, the Cooper Union accepted the American Association of Museums' offer to conduct a study on the future of the museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was located nearby, offered to take over all of the museum's holdings. By 1965, the Smithsonian Institution had begun negotiating to take over the museum from the Cooper Union. At the time, the institution was rapidly expanding the number of artworks and artifacts in its other museums. Smithsonian operation 1960s and 1970s On October 9, 1967, Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley and Daniel Maggin, the chair of the board of trustees, signed an agreement turning over the collection and library of the museum to the Smithsonian. As part of the agreement, the museum was to stay in New York City permanently and would remain in the Cooper Union's Foundation Building for three years. Even before it had finalized its acquisition, the Smithsonian was negotiating to lease the Andrew Carnegie Mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side as the collection's new home. The mansion was five times as large as the museum's Cooper Union space. The New York Supreme Court approved the agreement on May 14, 1968. The museum was officially transferred to the Smithsonian on July 1, becoming the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, and Richard T. Wunder was named as the director.