American Museum of Natural History
Vast natural science museum on Central Park West, with dinosaur halls and the Hayden Planetarium.
Chartered in 1869, the American Museum of Natural History occupies a sprawling complex of more than twenty interconnected buildings between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side. The first structure, a Victorian Gothic block by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, opened in 1877 and has since been absorbed into later ranges. Successive campaigns added the Romanesque Revival West 77th Street front and, in 1936, John Russell Pope's Beaux-Arts Theodore Roosevelt Memorial, whose columned portico remains the museum's ceremonial entrance.
The collections exceed thirty million specimens and artefacts, of which only a fraction is displayed across some forty-five permanent halls. Visitors encounter the fossil halls on the fourth floor, the suspended blue whale model in the Hall of Ocean Life, the Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals, and dioramas of African and North American mammals. The Rose Center for Earth and Space, completed in 2000, encloses the spherical Hayden Planetarium, while the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation opened in 2023.
Highlights
- Theodore Roosevelt Memorial rotunda and Beaux-Arts Central Park West portico
- Fossil halls with mounted Tyrannosaurus rex and Apatosaurus skeletons
- 94-foot blue whale model suspended in the Hall of Ocean Life
- Rose Center for Earth and Space and the Hayden Planetarium sphere
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