Читать книгу The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way - Colin Davey - Страница 13

Introduction

The American Museum of Natural History is one of New York City’s most beloved institutions and one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world. Since 1869, generations of New Yorkers and tourists of all ages have been educated and entertained at the museum. Located across Central Park West from Central Park, the sprawling museum structure, consisting of dozens of separate buildings spanning four city blocks, is a fascinating conglomeration of diverse architectural styles built up over a period of about 150 years.

This is the first book to tell the history of the museum from the point of view of these buildings. It also contains the first history of the museum’s astronomy department and Hayden Planetarium. It’s a story of history, politics, science, and exploration and features many forceful, colorful, and passionate personalities, including American presidents, New York power brokers, museum presidents, polar and African explorers, dinosaur hunters, and German rocket scientists.

This emphasis on the museum’s buildings is especially timely in light of the proposed addition of a major new section, the Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. The first draft of this book was written before the Gilder Center was announced, and the project is covered in the Epilogue. As this book documents, the Gilder Center is the largest new construction project at the museum since the 1930s. Compared to the previous major project, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, which largely replaced an existing building, the Gilder Center adds about 200,000 square feet for collections, exhibits, and education spaces.

Overview

A quick chronological overview of the story is as follows.

In Chapter 1, the museum’s founder, Albert Bickmore, secures the rocky, hilly, swampy site, then known as Manhattan Square, for the museum in 1872.

In Chapter 2, Bickmore works with the architects Vaux and Mould to design the cross-in-a-box master plan intended to govern all future building on the site, and then builds the first section, which opens in 1877.

In Chapter 3, the museum’s third president, Morris K. Jesup, launches a flurry of building, resulting in the completion of the museum’s palatial fortress-like Seventy-Seventh Street façade in 1899. In 1905 and 1908, a couple more sections are added.

In Chapter 5, the museum’s fourth president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, deviates from the master plan by allowing building in the courtyard areas, with the southern portion of Manhattan Square being filled in during the 1920s. During the early 1930s, he gets the Central Park West façade underway, including the monumental Theodore Roosevelt Memorial entrance. Plans are also put in place for building a planetarium in the northeast courtyard, although no funding is yet available.

In Chapter 8, we see that from 1936 to 1999 there were no major new sections added to the museum and that buiding was limited to filling in voids in the courtyard areas.

In Chapter 9, the obstacles to building the long-desired planetarium are overcome during the first year of the museum’s fifth president, F. Trubee Davison, and the Hayden Planetarium opens in 1935.

In Chapter 13, under museum president Ellen Futter, along with planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson, in an effort to revitalize and modernize the astronomy program, the Hayden Planetarium is replaced by the Rose Center for Earth and Space, which opened in the year 2000.

In the Epilogue, on December 11, 2014, the museum announces plans to build the Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, its largest new construction project since the 1930s.

New York History

The history of the museum is so woven into the fabric of the history of New York City and State that to a large extent this is a book of New York history.

As we will see in Chapter 1, the American Museum of Natural History’s origin story, including the choice of its location, is intimately tied to the growth of New York City from a small Dutch outpost to a world-class metropolis and the creation of Central Park. It involved some of the most important and colorful characters in the city’s history, from the notoriously and epically corrupt and powerful William “Boss” Tweed to one of New York’s unsung heroes, Andrew Haswell Green, a founder of Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Bronx Zoo, and who is known as the Father of New York City for his role in uniting Manhattan with the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island to form the city that we know today.

We will also meet Robert Moses, the legendary and controversial power broker who transformed the New York metropolitan area from the 1920s through the 1960s by overseeing the construction of the region’s most important roads, bridges, parks, and beaches, as well as the United Nations and Lincoln Center, among other things. As we will see in Chapter 9 and Chapter 10, Moses played a significant role in the building and early years of the Hayden Planetarium. He also makes cameo appearances in Chapter 5 and Chapter 8. Despite several comprehensive books about Moses and his career, this is the first to detail his roles with the museum and especially the Hayden Planetarium.

Another theme that runs through this book is the long association between the museum and America’s twenty-sixth president, Theodore Roosevelt, who spent years in New York City and State government, including a stint as governor. We first meet him in Chapter 1 as a child visiting the early museum that his father helped found. In Chapter 4 we see his support, first as undersecretary of the navy and later as president of the United States, for Robert Peary’s mission to reach the North Pole, and in Chapter 6 we accompany him on a safari with Carl Akeley, in which Roosevelt kills one of the elephants on display in the Hall of African Mammals today. And in Chapter 5, we see museum president Henry Fairfield Osborn’s effort to memorialize Roosevelt at the museum, an effort in which he was only partially successful.

Expeditions

But of course, the main work of the museum and planetarium is its expeditions, collections, science, research, educational outreach, and exhibits. Obviously this book can’t contain a comprehensive survey of these topics. Instead, it presents a selection based on its relevance to the construction of the museum and the planetarium, combined with being personally interesting to the author, and providing an opportunity to contribute new research.

In addition to overseeing the majority of the growth of the museum’s buildings, the museum’s presidents Jesup and Osborn also oversaw the museum’s “golden age of exploration,” undertaking research expeditions to every corner of the earth. From this myriad of storied expeditions, this book selects two for in-depth chapters: Robert Peary’s exploration of the Arctic during the Jesup presidency and Carl Akeley’s exploration of Africa during the Osborn presidency. Incidentally, both these expeditions received critical support from Theodore Roosevelt.

Chapter 4 tells the story of the museum’s role in Robert Peary’s quest to reach the North Pole and in the acquisition of the thirty-four-ton Ahnighito meteorite, the largest in any museum. Peary is widely, although controversially, credited with leading the first expedition to reach the North Pole, on April 6, 1909. This was the culmination of twenty-three years of effort and eight grueling expeditions to Arctic Greenland and Canada beginning in 1886. The museum and its president Jesup began a long and fruitful relationship with Peary in 1895 when, at the behest of Peary’s wife, they funded a mission to bring Peary and his crew home after they were stranded in Greenland at the end of a particularly grueling expedition. The Ahnighito meteorite has been displayed at three locations in the museum, including the original Hayden Planetarium. Each move required a feat of engineering. Although many books have been written about Robert Peary and his polar quest, this is the first detailed telling of the Peary story from an American Museum–centric point of view.

Chapter 6 tells the story of the Akeley African Hall, whose centerpiece is a group of eight elephants and which contains the Mountain Gorilla Diorama, one of the museum’s most iconic images. The two-story hall was designed by Carl Akeley, the museum’s African explorer, and the six-story museum section that it resides in was specially designed to accommodate the hall. The trajectory of Akeley’s entire life led directly to this space, and it was his single-minded focus over the final seventeen years of his life. His work on the hall began in 1909, hunting elephants for the elephant group with Theodore Roosevelt, and it ended in 1926, when he died in Africa in the beautiful region depicted in the gorilla diorama.

The museum is probably best known for its dinosaur exhibits. The gigantic creatures that dominated the earth’s surface hundreds of millions of years ago never fail to capture the public’s imagination. For more than a century, the museum has been home to the world’s most important collection of dinosaur fossils collected over countless expeditions. Chapter 7 traces the evolution of the museum’s dinosaur halls, from the origins of modern paleontology, through the growth of its buildings, to the current exhibits, focusing on six of the museum’s largest and most beloved specimens, which have historically formed the centerpieces of those halls, including the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex and Apatosaurus (formerly known as Brontosaurus).

Hayden Planetarium

There was no major new construction at the museum from 1936 to 1999. This is the period that spanned the life of the original Hayden Planetarium, to which Part 2 of this book switches focus. For this section, we are joined by my coauthor Thomas A. Lesser, formerly a senior lecturer at the original Hayden Planetarium. As Neil deGrasse Tyson told us when we were beginning this project, “A book on Hayden’s history is long overdue.” This is the first detailed history of the museum’s astronomy department and Hayden Planetarium.

The grand opening of the Hayden Planetarium on October 10, 1935, was the result of many forces and events—cosmological, scientific, economic, and political. Chapter 9 tells this story, starting with early forays into astronomy at the American Museum, the invention of the Zeiss projection planetarium, and the museum’s scientific Renaissance man and educator Clyde Fisher. The long-sought planetarium finally became a reality during the Great Depression thanks to the New Deal programs of President Franklin Roosevelt, the lobbying of New York’s emerging power broker Robert Moses, and the philanthropy of Charles Hayden, the planetarium’s namesake.

Despite the planetarium’s auspicious grand opening, by 1941 attendance had been consistently disappointing, and financial difficulties threatened the planetarium’s very existence. Chapter 10 describes the elaborate proposal by Robert Moses, along with the industrial and theatrical designer Norman Bel Geddes (who had designed the 1939 World Fair’s Futurama exhibit), for radically redesigning the planetarium. The chapter also describes how the planetarium’s financial crisis was ultimately resolved.

As you might expect, the planetarium experienced a heyday during the space race, starting in the years leading up to it and lasting through the Apollo program’s Moon landing. But the planetarium also played a significant role in igniting that race. Chapter 11 tells this story, which has its roots in the earliest days of rocket science and includes the stories of two gifted young German rocket scientists and friends: Willy Ley, who fled to America as the Nazis rose to power, and Wernher von Braun, who led the Nazi rocket program.

Chapter 12 guides you through a visit to the original Hayden Planetarium, including:

Black Light Murals, a collection of incredibly realistic, life-sized, fluorescent astronomical images as you might see them from the cockpit of a spaceship or standing on the surface of an alien world;

Your Weight on Other Worlds, a simple but popular exhibit consisting of five scales showing the visitor’s weight on the Moon, Mars, the Sun, Venus, and Jupiter;

The Copernican Theater, a forty-foot-wide ceiling-mounted mechanical animated model of the solar system; and

The Sky Theater, where you would see the planetarium’s main event, an astronomical topic presented using astonishingly realistic simulations of the night sky projected onto the dome by the Zeiss projector, along with other special effects and projectors.

Astronomia, an innovative, bright, and colorful exhibition hall designed in the 1960s with hands-on mechanical exhibits illustrating abstract astronomical concepts;

As the Apollo program drew to a close in 1972, the public’s interest in spaceflight waned, as did the Hayden Planetarium’s attendance figures. Chapter 13 tells the story of how efforts in the early 1990s to reinvigorate and modernize the planetarium evolved into plans for the first major new building at the museum in sixty years, after Ellen Futter became the museum’s president in 1993 and Neil deGrasse Tyson joined the staff in 1994. The result was the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a gigantic sphere encased in a monumental glass cube on the footprint of the original Hayden Planetarium.

Now, let’s start where it all began: a desolate, rocky, hilly, swampy site known as Manhattan Square.