American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History (shortened as AMNH) is a 501(c)(3) private natural history museum on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The museum complex, located across the street from Central Park in Theodore Roosevelt Park, consists of 26 linked buildings with 45 permanent exhibition rooms, a planetarium, and a library. Over 34 million examples of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, gems, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural relics, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, are housed in the museum’s collections, of which only a small portion can be displayed at any given time. The museum is almost 2 million square feet in size (190,000 m2). The AMNH employs 225 full-time scientists, supports over 120 special field missions each year, and receives over five million visitors.

 

The American Museum of Natural History seeks to “find, interpret, and share knowledge about human civilizations, the natural world, and the cosmos via scientific research and teaching.” Continue reading about New York here.

 

The cornerstone for the museum’s initial structure was placed in 1874. Still, it is largely obscured by the various buildings in the complex that now comprise most of Manhattan Square. Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould, both well-known for their work on Central Park’s architecture, created the original Victorian Gothic structure, which opened in 1877.

 

The museum is located at 79th Street and Central Park West and is accessible through the New York City Subway’s B and C lines. The 81st Street–Museum of Natural History subway station on the IND Eighth Avenue Line has a low-level floor with direct entry into the museum at the south end of the upper platform (where uptown trains arrive).

 

A stainless steel time capsule stands on a pedestal outside the museum’s Columbus Avenue entrance, resulting from a design competition won by Santiago Calatrava. The capsule was sealed in 2000 to commemorate the start of the third century. It’s a folded saddle-shaped volume with numerous axes of symmetry that investigates the formal features of folded spherical frames. Calatrava referred to it as a “bloom.” According to the plan, the capsule will be opened in the year 3000.

 

The museum is located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, a 17-acre (69,000 m2) public park that stretches from Central Park West to Columbus Avenue and from West 77th to 81st Streets and has park benches, gardens, and lawns, as well as a dog run. More about New York City.

 

Theodore Roosevelt’s Equestrian Statue, which stood outside the museum facing Central Park West, was dismantled in January 2022 and will be loaned to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota on a long-term basis. The Library is set to open in 2026, but no plans have been made for how or where the monument will be placed on its grounds. Because of the statue’s secondary representation of African American and Native American people behind Roosevelt, it has sparked debate.

 

More information is available on the website or dialing (212) 769-5100.