December 22, 1877: The American Museum of Natural History Opens

December 22, 1877: The American Museum of Natural History opens in New York, on land bordered by West 81st Street, Central Park West (8th Avenue), West 77th Street and Columbus Avenue (9th Avenue). President Rutherford B. Hayes attends the dedication ceremony.

The Museum is directly across Central Park, 1 mile away, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum complex comprises 20 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to the Rose Center for Earth and Space (formerly the Hayden Planetarium) and a library. The museum collections contain about 35 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time.

The Museum occupies more than 2.5 million square feet, has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, and averages about 5 million visits annually. It is a private 501(c)(3) organization. Its mission statement is: "To discover, interpret, and disseminate -- through scientific research and education -- knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe."

The main entrance and lobby, on Central Park West, were built in 1936, as the official New York State Memorial to Theodore Roosevelt. The 26th President of the United States was the 1st President born in New York City -- Donald Trump was the 2nd, but we don't count him -- and the Roosevelt family has been a major benefactor to the museum, dating back to his father, also named Theodore Roosevelt. TR's 1909-10 hunting trip to Africa resulted in hundreds of specimens that he sent back to the Museum.

In 1940, an equestrian statue of TR, sculpted by James Earle Fraser, was placed at the Central Park West entrance. Unfortunately, on either side of the horseborne TR is a Native American man and a sub-Saharan African man. The statue has thus been called racially insensitive. TR's grandson, investment banker Theodore Roosevelt IV, supported the calls for its removal, which was done in 2022.

Part of the dinosaur display. TR was a bit old-fashioned,

and he could be intimidating, but he was not a dinosaur.

When I was a kid, the Museum was my favorite place in the whole world. All those stuffed animals, and the dinosaur skeletons, and the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, opening in 1924, with the giant blue whale suspended from the ceiling. The Planetarium hit my interest in astronomy.

We went there many times between my ages of 4 and 15. I didn't get to go back until my nieces were old enough to go. By that point, my legs were in such bad shape that all that walking on hard floors left me in misery. Fortunately, I've since gotten my hips replaced, and have been to other museums with them without pain.

*

December 22, 1877 was a Saturday. There were no scores on this historic day.