Opening the Pocket Doors: A Look at Executive Director, David Kahn

Welcome to our second installment of Opening the Pocket Doors, our ongoing series looking into the processing of the Institutional Records of the Brooklyn Historical Society.  

In our previous post in this series, we delved into a brief history of our institution, formerly known as both the Long Island Historical Society and the Brooklyn Historical Society. Today, we are looking at the legacy of Executive Director David Kahn and how, under his leadership, the society transitioned to a new era as the Brooklyn Historical Society.  

David Kahn was hired as the Executive Director to the Long Island Historical Society in 1982. As one of his first acts as Executive Director, he spearheaded the name change to Brooklyn Historical Society. Kahn wanted to reflect the geographic area that the society had already been dedicated to serving for the past several decades.  

While geographically located on the land mass of Long Island, Brooklyn had been an entity unto itself from its conception as a village to becoming the third largest city in the United States to eventually becoming a borough of New York City in 1898. The Long Island Historical Society, similarly, remained focused on the most populated area in which it was situated, having constructed a building in the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.  

Two major projects that were extremely important to David Kahn were to introduce an education program and to reintroduce exhibits to the newly minted Brooklyn Historical Society. Before Kahn took on his role as Executive Director, LIHS had been pretty closed off to the public. Previously, membership was required to enter the library, and not open to everyone. Kahn wanted to create educational programming and invite children into the space for the first time. He felt that school children could benefit from a greater understanding of Brooklyn’s history that the society could offer in a way that differed from a classroom, where children could experience their community’s history on a more personal level.  

In the 1980s, the way we conceptualize museums also shifted. Instead of perpetuating the status quo of whitewashed history, the focus changed to social history and highlighting the stories of people who had historically been silenced. David Kahn wanted the Brooklyn Historical Society to be a part of that. His main goal for exhibits was to shift the focus of the society from the rich, white men who started the institution to the actual communities who make up the majority of Brooklyn, including working class, immigrant, Black, Latine, and LGBTQ populations. During his time as Executive Director, BHS put on such exhibits as: Black Churches in Brooklyn, ¿Por Qué Brooklyn?: Our Borough’s Latino Voices, and AIDS/Brooklyn. The work David Kahn put into highlighting these populations laid the groundwork for expanding the collections and exhibition topics of the institution and is the legacy that the Center for Brooklyn History plans to continue projecting into our future.  

The Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Archive Project is generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal of Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.