IF THE ANNIVERSARY fifty years previous had served as a general guideline, the 200th anniversary of New York’s prestigious Seventh Regiment in 2006 would have been celebrated with a Grand Review and Anniversary Ball at the unit’s castle-like armory on Park Avenue between 66th and 67th Streets. As it happens, by that time the Seventh had been (in a sense) “demoted” from an infantry regiment to a corps support group and expelled from the armory its members built with their own money in the late nineteenth century. Within a year, the 107th CSG NYARNG — the official designation of what everyone knew as the Seventh — was disbanded.

A shameful way to treat a regiment that saved the nation’s capital from Confederate troops and helped break the Hindenburg line in 1918. Soldiers of the Seventh earned the Medal of Honor in two wars and laid down their lives for their country in even more. But to add further insult to the injuries already sustained, the Seventh Regiment Conservancy recently “rebranded” the building as “Park Avenue Armory” erasing the regiment’s name. The rebranding takes place despite the historic presence of no less than three armories on Park Avenue: the Squadron A and the 71st Regiment in addition to the Seventh — with the 69th Regiment on Lexington Avenue just a block east of Park Avenue.

The Seventh Regiment Armory contains what is widely recognized as some of the finest interiors in North America. Kevin Stayton, the Curator of Decorative Arts at the Brooklyn Museum, has said that “The rooms on the first floor of the armory are the single most important collection of 19th century interiors to survive intact in one building.” A few years ago, the Division of Military and Naval Affairs (New York’s equivalent of a defense department) handed the armory to a conservancy founded to transform what had been a living, breathing institution into yet another a venue for classical music and performances, in a city with no shortage of performance venues and with parking in the neighborhood already stretched to capacity.

“It’s insulting,” said one frequent observer of Armory affairs who spoke on condition of anonymity. “With the black-and-white logo and the new name; They are clearly aiming for the ’swish’ factor, in complete ignorance of the two-hundred-year history of the regiment whose home they have essentially stolen.” Years of legal battles between the State of New York, which had long neglected the fabric of the structure, and the Veterans of the Seventh Regiment, Inc., the owners of the building’s contents and artifacts, were ostensibly ended when the State passed a law simply declaring that the contents were henceforth to be considered property of the State rather than the Veterans group, which had possessed them since the Regiment sold the artifacts to the group in the 1950’s.

The “Park Avenue Armory Conservancy” — as the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy is currently doing business as — has completed some much-needed repairs to the structure as part of an overall restoration plan, but many question whether the expulsion of the military units based there and the sidelining of the building’s history in favor of a venue for antique fairs and classical music was worth the price.