Foreword: The American Museum of Natural History and How it Got That Way
From The American Museum of Natural History and How it Got That Way by Colin Davey with Thomas A. Lesser.
The American Museum of Natural History, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, sits within a school-trip distance of thirty-million people. As a native of New York City, we visited as a family. I visited with classmates. I came by myself. I came with friends. Decades later, I would bring my own kids.
Each display hall represents the a slow accretion of architectural spaces, built over time, as vision and budget allowed. Within these spaces, AMNH pioneered the diorama, and the story-telling that it enabled. Previously, museums were cabinets of curiosities — collections of tagged old-things on display shelves. But artifacts have history, culture, purpose, and most importantly, emotional or spiritual value. Why not infuse static collections with a recreated life of their own? One where the visitor could, but does not need to read the accompanying text because the diorama shows it all – the who, the when, the why, the how, and most importantly, the context.
And when the thing is not an artifact, but a part of nature itself – drawn from the land, the sea, the air, or the animal & plant kingdoms, they still make excellent dioramas.
My wife, raised in Alaska, was wholly unmoved by the arctic flora and fauna of the Hall of North American Mammals, with its brown bear, and caribou. In particular, the moose diorama looked exactly like her walking path to the school bus. Nor did she pause for the colorful aurora borealis, meticulously painted across the diorama back panels. “That just looks like home,” she would say.
That’s surely some of the best evidence that the Museum got it right. But wait, I have more.
My first time in the plains of Africa, at Kruger National Park wild game reserve, I visited a watering hole (from binocular distance) which was crowded and busy with baboons, zebras, giraffes, and wildebeests. With a small herd of large elephants ambling in the distance. My first thought, at once joyous and embarrassing, was “This scene reminds me of the African watering hole diorama in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at American Museum of Natural History!”.
Of course not everything in AMNH lives in a diorama. What scene would you build for the 58 -ton Cape York meteorite in the Hall of Meteorites? Its native habitat is the vacuum of space. Or the dinosaur halls: bones, bones, bones. Even so, from its menacing posture, there’s no doubt that T-Rex wants to eat you.
This uncanny realism, rampant throughout the Museum, is not bound to Earth. As an urban kid, you foster no relationship with the night sky. City lights. Tall buildings. Air pollution. It all impedes your communion with the cosmos. So imagine a nine-year old child, who had never seen or noticed the night sky before, imprinted by the star-filled dome of the American Museum’s Hayden Planetarium. Over the decades, I have come to wonder whether it was not I who chose the universe, but instead the universe that chose me.
Into adulthood, with access to the world’s greatest mountaintop observatories, I reflect on the majestic canopies of stars and I (still) say to myself, “These skies remind me of the Hayden Planetarium.“
The legacy of the Hayden Planetarium, now part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space at AMNH, extends beyond its architectural footprint. More than one hundred books and a thousand research papers have been published by members of the educational and scientific staff since it was founded in 1935. Becoming its Director (in 1996) was a call to duty. To ensure that the Hayden Planetarium I oversee has no less impact on the hearts and minds of visitors today than the Hayden Planetarium that had touched me so deeply a lifetime ago.
Such was the influence of AMNH my ambitions and my outlook on the world. And such was the influence of AMNH on generations past and present, as will continue to be its influence on countless generations to come.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist
American Museum of Natural History &
Director, Hayden Planetarium
December 17, 2018