American Museum of Natural History

A museum that grew from one building in 1877 to twenty-one buildings and more than thirty million specimens

Local name: American Museum of Natural History

Collection: New York · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The museum’s pink granite facade on 77th Street · Suicasmo, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the American Museum of Natural History. For years the naturalist Albert Bickmore campaigned for the idea. In 1869 the museum was created by a special act of New York State. Its founders included Theodore Roosevelt Sr., the father of the future president, and John Pierpont Morgan. Bickmore wrote the museum’s charter together with Joseph Choate. Two years later, in 1871, the museum opened in the old Arsenal in Central Park. In 1874 a new building was begun here, on the former Manhattan Square. President Ulysses S. Grant laid the cornerstone. On the twenty-second of December 1877 the first building opened, with President Rutherford B. Hayes in attendance. It was designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, the same pair who began the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You cannot see it now: it is hidden behind the long pink granite facade on 77th Street, with its round towers. The main entrance in front of you is the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial, shaped like a Roman triumphal arch. It was designed by John Russell Pope. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a relative of Theodore, dedicated the memorial on the nineteenth of January 1936. For many years an equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt stood in front of the entrance. It was criticized for the way it showed a Native American and an African man beside him, and in January 2022 the statue was removed. Today the museum is twenty-one connected buildings. It has more than forty permanent halls and more than thirty million specimens and objects: fossils, minerals, animals and the things of many peoples.

Visiting

200 Central Park West, at 79th Street. Open daily 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., except Thanksgiving and Christmas. Admission is paid; it is best to get tickets in advance. The 81st Street–Museum of Natural History subway station is right under the museum.