On January 27, 1971, Robert G. Goelet was elected president of the N-YHS, thereby earning the unenviable task of leading the Society through this challenging period. Goelet was a direct descendent of Francis Goelet, a Huguenot who had immigrated to North America in 1676. Over the years, the Goelet family rose to the highest levels of real estate, banking, and the arts in New York. In the early 1900s, Goelet's father, Robert Walton Goelet, built on the family's already sizable fortune, amassing real estate parcels that even at Depression era prices were estimated to be worth well over $15 million in 1932.
Like many of his peers, Goelet took great interest in a variety of cultural and philanthropic institutions. At the time of his election to the Society's board of trustees in 1961, he was on the board of the American Museum of Natural History (of which he later became chairman), the New York Zoological Society, the Phipps Houses, and the National Audubon Society. During his nearly ten years on the N-YHS board, his primary focus was the Society's museum; in fact, he had chaired the board's museum committee for much of his tenure. His election to president marked the first time that the Society's top-ranking board officer had not served on either the library committee or the finance committee.
Under Goelet, the Society continued down the path on which it had embarked in the late 1960s, focusing on improving the galleries, increasing general attendance, broadening the Society's acquisitions and collections management policies, and expanding public programs. In the 1971 annual report, Richard Koke, the director of the museum, expressed the Society's renewed commitment to the museum: "For several years the course for the museum, chosen by the Trustees, has been directed toward strengthening its program and collections to bring it to the high position that it enjoyed in public favor in the 19th century." To help it achieve that lofty goal, the Society hired Mary Black to fill a new position, curator of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts.
For his part, Goelet gave the museum top billing in his first annual report, introducing the report of the president by expressing his satisfaction with the improvements of the museum, noting "the Society's. . . continued progress in the modernization and reinstallation of our museum galleries." Although no one would question the basic desire to improve the museum, returning it to its nineteenth-century stature was simply not possible. The museum had achieved its earlier status without competition from the many museums that had established themselves in New York City in the intervening hundred years, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, located directly across Central Park.