Biography|James S. Snyder — The West Wing He Helped Open on 53rd Street

The Museum of Modern Art reopened on 17 May 1984 after a four-year expansion.

Cesar Pelli's west wing and the Museum Tower sat on West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth.

Snyder was already inside the building.

He had arrived as an intern in 1974, straight from Harvard, and stayed.

By 1986 the museum named him deputy director, a post he held through 1996.

The 1984 project more than doubled gallery space and cost in the mid-fifties of millions of dollars.

Later official biographies credit him with organizational responsibility for that expansion, and for the Picasso retrospective of 1980 and the Matisse retrospective of 1992.

The envelope a visitor sees now is not Pelli's.

Yoshio Taniguchi rebuilt the campus in the early 2000s.

The pin is the same lot: 11 West 53rd Street.

What the year records is the job.

Snyder learned to run a museum by expanding one.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Museum of Modern Art exterior