Читать книгу The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way - Colin Davey - Страница 16

2

The Master Plan and the Bickmore Wing

T he building of the American Museum of Natural History’s first section, now known as the Bickmore Wing, involved two ceremonies led by two US presidents. On June 2, 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant led the cornerstone-laying ceremony. And on December 22, 1877, five years after the museum received its home in Manhattan Square, President Rutherford B. Hayes led the grand-opening ceremony.

Once the Manhattan Square site was selected for the American Museum, the next order of business was designing the building and preparing the grounds. In the summer of 1872, the park commissioners assigned the Central Park architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould the job of designing buildings for the two sister museums, the American Museum and the Metropolitan Museum. This team was the natural choice. Vaux had co-designed the park’s Greensward plan with Frederick Law Olmsted. Mould, the park’s assistant architect from 1858 to 1870 and its architect in chief during 1870 and 1871, had collaborated with Vaux on the design of Bethesda Terrace and Fountain, the park’s architectural heart, among many other park features. And in 1869, before the Metropolitan Museum was founded, the two men had worked together on designs for an art museum on the site that would later be occupied by the museum. On June 12, 1872, the park board requested that Vaux consult with the American Museum’s executive committee and report back to the board with a design for the institution.¹

Vaux and Mould invited Bickmore to meet with them and bring the initial design he had shown to Richard Owen of the British Museum in 1865. That plan envisioned a central dome with two wings radiating from it, similar to the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. The wings were designed to provide space for a series of T-shaped display cases and would each contain an end section with staircases and rooms for curators.²

The architects came up with a master plan that extended this initial design. Two wings were added, forming a Greek cross. The end sections were extended to form broad façades fronting on Seventy-Seventh Street, Eighty-First Street, Central Park West, and Columbus Avenue. Each façade was a sort of replication of the initial design and formed a square. This design resulted in four courtyards that would provide natural lighting to the interior sides of the halls. In this way, the design would fill Manhattan Square, resulting in a building that would be the largest on the North American continent and the world’s largest museum.³ Visitors would be able to circulate around the museum’s perimeter as well as cross from east to west and north to south.

The design was cleverly broken into modular sections (central, entrance, and corner pavilions; wings, and transepts) that could be built one at a time, allowing the final structure to take shape gradually, with new sections being added as the need and funding arose. Since money was available only for one building, the museum chose to build the south transept first, as opposed to a street-facing façade, so as to lay claim to the entire Manhattan Square.⁴

The architectural style Vaux and Mould selected for the façade was a medieval Gothic style from Venice from the fourteenth century. This style, characterized by polychromatic brickwork, vertical lines, and gothic arches, had experienced a revival during the Victorian era thanks to the writings of the British architecture critic John Ruskin and is often described as Ruskinian Gothic, high Victorian Gothic, or Gothic Revival.

In August 1872, Vaux and Mould submitted their plan to the park board, the board approved the plan, and cost estimates were made and approved.⁵ At the same time, the site was being prepared. This included removing squatters, along with their herds of goats and pigs,⁶ leveling the grounds, removing rocks, and filling in the sections that were below ground level.⁷

Vaux and Mould’s 1872 master plan.

The museum’s first wing, aka the Bickmore Wing.

The Laying of the Cornerstone

In the spring of 1874, after the foundations and walls of the first floor were completed, the trustees invited President Ulysses S. Grant for a formal cornerstone-laying ceremony.⁸ Shortly after four o’clock on June 2, a beautiful spring Tuesday, Grant arrived, accompanied by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, Secretary of War William W. Belknap, and Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson. The festivities included live music provided by the Dodworth Band, a celebrated brass ensemble. Attending the event were Mayor William Frederick Havemeyer; Andrew Haswell Green; members of the museum’s board of trustees, including J. P. Morgan;⁹ a group of squatters who had recently been removed from the site;¹⁰ and a herd of goats.¹¹

After an opening prayer, speeches were made by the museum’s president, Robert L. Stuart; the Parks Department’s president, Henry G. Stebbins; Governor John Alden Dix; and Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. After the speeches, a time capsule was placed into the cornerstone—a copper box containing documents related to the museum and Central Park, fifteen newspapers and periodicals, some currency, and other odds and ends.¹²

President Grant smeared mortar over the cornerstone with a specially engraved ivory and silver trowel ordered for the occasion from Tiffany’s. (The trowel was presented to Grant as a souvenir and is now in the Smithsonian’s National Museum for American History.)¹³ The ceremony was followed by a visit to the museum at its Arsenal location.

The Grand Opening

Several years later, as the museum’s grand opening approached, once again the president of the United States, now Rutherford B. Hayes, was recruited for the ceremony. In the week preceding the opening, the museum was lit up so brilliantly it could be seen from New Jersey.

On the afternoon of the event, Saturday, December 22, 1877, the New York Times reported that “much of the available ground in the neighborhood was filled with carriages” that had carried “many of the best known and most distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the city.” The ceremony took place on the second floor, which seated eight hundred. The third-floor gallery, which overlooked the space, seated several hundred additional guests, and it was standing room only for hundreds more. Outside milled countless spectators who could not gain admission but hoped for a glimpse of the president.¹⁴

The cornerstone of the Bickmore Wing, being laid by President Grant on June 2, 1874.

Source: Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 20, 1874, 32.

At 2:30, after President Hayes and his party were given a private tour of the museum, the ceremonies began. The speakers sat at a platform assembled for the occasion while a band played at the opposite end of the hall. After an opening prayer, speeches were delivered by the museum’s president, Robert L. Stuart; the Parks Department’s president, William R. Martin; Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University; and the paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh.¹⁵ Finally, President Hayes spoke: “Mr. President and ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Without introduction, I now proceed to perform the honorable but brief and simple duty assigned to me. This enterprise, so noble, so splendid, which the country owes to the enlightened liberality of the city and citizens of New York, is now ready to be opened to the public; and I now declare, the opening ceremonies having been completed, that the American Museum of Natural History is now opened.”¹⁶

The Bickmore Wing viewed from the location of the current planetarium in 1878, shortly after its opening. Note the rough landscape.

Source: Harroun & Bierstadt/Museum of the City of New York. X2010.11.1234.

The Bickmore Wing, as seen from the roof of the Dakota, 1880.

Source: Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Epilogue: The Time Capsule

Around 1919, the year of the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, an interest developed in the time capsule that had been placed in the cornerstone back in 1874. However, no one could find it.

On September 17, 1941, perhaps with the museum’s forthcoming seventy-fifth anniversary in mind, museum director Wayne M. Faunce tried to pick the brain of the only person still alive who had attended the cornerstone-laying ceremony sixty-seven years earlier. That day, Faunce wrote to Edward Ringwood Hewitt, the son of one of the museum’s early trustees, who had been seven at the time of the ceremony. “It is a source of chagrin that no one now connected with the museum knows the location of this cornerstone,” Faunce wrote. “Can you throw any light on the matter?” Hewitt replied that “the whole place was covered with a cloth except the stone,” adding, “There would be no way in which a small boy could tell where it was as there was a wooden stand erected all over the place.”¹⁷

Around 1965, with the museum’s 1969 centennial approaching, interest in finding the cornerstone was renewed yet again, and Robin Smith, the museum’s librarian and archivist, was asked to keep an eye out for any new information. Aware that the search had been going on for about half a century, she was not confident.

But then a clue surfaced in the form of a June 3, 1874, article in the New York Times that stated that “full Masonic rites were observed in the ceremony.” This detail suggested that the cornerstone was in the northeast corner, as called for by Masonic tradition. In the summer of 1968, a museum volunteer named Richard Weil found another article about the ceremony in a copy of the Daily Graphic from June 4, 1874. An accompanying sketch also suggested the cornerstone was in the building’s northeast corner.

Then, one day when Smith was doing research in the Bickmore archives, she found a 1910 letter in which Bickmore recalled the “striking scene” of the cornerstone laying. “So many of my former associates have passed away,” he wrote, “that I find that I am probably the only person still living who can tell you from his own personal observation, the exact stone which the general placed in the exterior of our first section on that historic occasion … under my office window.” Bickmore indicated that the stone had a cross carved into it.

With this new information, drilling through the children’s cafeteria began at eight in the morning on November 19, 1968. By four that afternoon, workers found a stone carved with a faded cross, inside of which was a copper box, which was immediately placed in a safe. Two days later, the capsule was opened in the presence of several descendants of the museum’s founders, including J. P. Morgan’s great-grandson and Joseph Choate’s grandnephew.

After reading headlines of the 1874 newspapers about cabinet shakeups, civil rights, criticism of the police, and concern about communism, the museum’s president, Gardner D. Stout, remarked, “Nothing changes.”¹⁸

The museum celebrated its hundredth anniversary in 1969 with a yearlong exhibition called “100 Years of Wonder,” which included the items from the time capsule.¹⁹