How do public historians navigate the challenges of representing a city that has been endlessly produced and reproduced in popular culture? How do they seize on widespread interest in histories that have been dramatized for entertainment while exposing audiences to the people and stories that often go untold in these accounts? This roundtable engages curators from the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) and The New York Historical to explore these questions. It draws on themes explored in the December 2025 AHR History Lab on the process of curating the MCNY’s centennial exhibition, This is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture, to consider how those experiences can inform two new exhibitions on the Gilded Age and women’s lives in the Revolutionary period.