Immediately after the War, the building found yet more new uses. In 1869, in addition to the menagerie, it housed a new museum which would eventually become the American Museum of Natural History. Here esteemed British paleontologist B. Waterhouse Hawkins labored, reconstructing the skeletons of dinosaurs in a specially constructed workroom. An Gallery of Art was established on the first floor that same year and the Municipal Weather Bureau’s instruments were installed on the roof.

The Arsenal was bustling with activity.

In 1870 Jacob Wrey Mould was brought in to redesign the interiors and a year later, faced with numerous complaints about the stench and “great insecurity and danger,” the beloved menagerie was moved out.

Always a point of visual controversy the Arsenal was threatened again in 1912 when Henry Clay Frick proposed to dismantle the old 1877 Lenox Library, now vacant with the opening of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue, and re-erect it on the site of the Arsenal. Frick’s gift was turned down, an act Mayor William J. Gaynor viewed as an insult to Frick and announced that he was “determined” to demolish the Arsenal, calling it “unsanitary and unfit.” The New York Times chimed in, siding with the Mayor and labeling it “an eyesore, fetid with the smell of the stables and the nearby menagerie” and saying “the old structure was never a thing of beauty, even in its palmiest days.”

Although the building survived the threat, the Parks Department offices left the Arsenal in 1914, moving to the new Municipal Building downtown. The building sat neglected and essentially empty, other than the weather instruments on the roof. In 1916 the Department considered razing the building, although nothing was done. Instead it sat for nearly a decade decaying.

In 1922 The New York Times, which had once so vigorously condemned the Armory, lamented “New York does not destroy its old monuments, it ignores them. Such has been the fate of one of the oldest structures devoted to public uses in the territory north of Fifty-ninth Street – the Armory in Central Park.

“...the first State arsenal erected to safeguard the greatest port in the world and the greatest city in America stands facing palatial and opulent upper Fifth Avenue, dilapidated and deserted, with broken windows, cracked lintels, a rickety iron staircase, uneven board floors and more holes in the roof than there are spots on the skin of the leopard in a cage near by…while 'The Arsenal!' is a sinister monument to the neglect of those charged with its maintenance and preservation.”

A contrite City appropriated $75,000 to restore the Arsenal, converting much of the interior space for Parks Department offices. New turrets and a clock were constructed, and basement storage areas were added. A secret passage under the building was discovered which was possibly intended for the covert movement of munitions.

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