I guess my last visit to the Museum was really more years ago than it should have been, back around 2008 I guess,-- but my disappointment with some of the changes there was matched by the disappointment I felt with the art course I was taking at Brooklyn's City Tech...
For those whose memories go way back, first of all there were the wonderful dioramas done by a French artist in about 1940, which perfectly captured the spirit of the places they showed and had, of course, the now somewhat politically incorrect stuffed animals you would expect to find there.
Alas, the Museum decided that these dioramas needed some sprucing up --and after refurbishing I noticed, to my chagrin, that somehow while the colors were now indeed brighter, SOMETHING was now wrong with the feeling of the places--for instance, the one scene in the Rockies ( which I viewed not long after being in the real place years ago) brought shivers to my spine with the way it so exactly captured the feeling of what I had seen in reality...and I was transported magically back there in a way I find difficult to explain...it was like a living dream state, if you can imagine that.
I saw how they had introduced these commercially-oriented "base camps" there while on a visit with my sister and my two young nephews as well as a British woman friend of my sister's ( who had the annoying habit of explaining things to the boys all the time that they could obviously see for themselves, or which were just plain weird...but let's not get into that).
"Everything is pretty expensive here," remarked my NOT-poor sister, who added somewhat acridly, " Everywhere Disney is involved, they are very keen on making as much money as possible."
I can't remember if the boys wanted to buy anything-- T-shirts etc.--or not, all I remember was having to help my five year old nephew walk down a huge flight of big (but not steep) marble steps inside the Museum at one point. I held his hand very lightly, to let him do as much balancing and handling of the situation as he could, as we slowly made our way down-- his other hand, I have to note, on a railing just to be on the safe side.
This is not to discourage anyone from visiting the Museum, on the contrary, it still gives a good bang for the buck (unless they have raised the admission more than I think they should have in the last couple of years)...( you MUST visit their website, which I put at the end of this posting)
And, as is true with all good museums, there is much more than you can see even vaguely on just one visit...
Oh yes, I notice the current emphasis is on the whales there...this brings back the memory of a business dinner I attended in the 1980's where executives I was doing work for dined "under the whales," in the Hall of Mammals...the Museum was, of course, experiencing financial difficulties and was catering to any groups where it thought it might get some more support.
I will close this just giving a part of the Wikipedia article on the Museum, because I find while these are great, really, they just go on too long...
The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH), located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world. Located in park-like grounds across the street from Central Park, the museum complex contains 27 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain over 32 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, and human cultural artifacts, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time, and occupies 1,600,000 square feet (150,000 m2). The Museum has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year,[5] and averages about five million visits annually.
History
The Museum was founded in 1869.[1] Prior to construction of the present complex, the Museum was housed in the Arsenal building in Central Park. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of the 26th U.S. President, was one of the founders along with John David Wolfe, William T. Blodgett, Robert L. Stuart, Andrew H. Green, Robert Colgate, Morris K. Jesup, Benjamin H. Field, D. Jackson Steward, Richard M. Blatchford, J. Pierpont Morgan, Adrian Iselin, Moses H. Grinnell, Benjamin B. Sherman, A. G. Phelps Dodge, William A. Haines, Charles A. Dana, Joseph H. Choate, Henry G. Stebbins, Henry Parish, and Howard Potter. The founding of the Museum realized the dream of naturalist Dr. Albert S. Bickmore. Bickmore, a one-time student of Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, lobbied tirelessly for years for the establishment of a natural history museum in New York. His proposal, backed by his powerful sponsors, won the support of the Governor of New York, John Thompson Hoffman, who signed a bill officially creating the American Museum of Natural History on April 6, 1869.[6]In 1874, the cornerstone was laid for the Museum's first building, which is now hidden from view by the many buildings in the complex that today occupy most of Manhattan Square. The original Victorian Gothic building, which was opened in 1877, was designed by Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould, both already closely identified with the architecture of Central Park.[7]:19-20 It was soon eclipsed by the south range of the Museum, designed by J. Cleaveland Cady, an exercise in rusticated brownstone neo-Romanesque, influenced by H. H. Richardson.[8] It extends 700 feet (210 m) along West 77th Street,[9] with corner towers 150 feet (46 m) tall. Its pink brownstone and granite, similar to that found at Grindstone Island in the St. Lawrence River, came from quarries at Picton Island, New York.[10] The entrance on Central Park West, the New York State Memorial to Theodore Roosevelt, completed by John Russell Pope in 1936, is an overscaled Beaux-Arts monument.[11] It leads to a vast Roman basilica, where visitors are greeted with a cast of a skeleton of a rearing Barosaurus defending her young from an Allosaurus. The Museum is also accessible through its 77th street foyer, renamed the "Grand Gallery" and featuring a fully suspended Haida canoe. The hall leads into the oldest extant exhibit in the Museum, the hall of Northwest Coast Indians.[12]
The architect Kevin Roche and his firm Roche-Dinkeloo has been responsible for the master planning of the museum since the 1990s. Various renovations both interior and exterior have been carried out including improvements to Dinosaur Hall and mural restoration in Roosevelt Memorial Hall. In 1992 the firm designed the new eight story AMNH Library. Additional renovations are currently under way.
The Museum's south front, spanning 77th Street from Central Park West to Columbus Avenue was cleaned, repaired and re-emerged in 2009. Steven Reichl, a spokesman for the Museum, said that work would include restoring 650 black-cherry window frames and stone repairs. The Museum's consultant on the latest renovation is Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., an architectural and engineering firm with headquarters in Northbrook, IL.[8]
The museum's first two presidents were John David Wolfe (1870–1872) and Robert L. Stuart (1872–1881), both among the museum's founders. The museum was not put on a sound footing until the appointment of the third president, Morris K. Jesup (also one of the original founders), in 1881. Jesup was president for over 25 years, overseeing its expansion and much of its golden age of exploration and collection. The fourth president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was appointed in 1906 on the death of Jesup. Osborn consolidated the museum's expansion, developing it into one of the world's foremost natural history museums. F. Trubee Davison was president from 1933 to 1951, with A. Perry Osborn as Acting President from 1941 to 1946. Alexander M. White was president from 1951 to 1968. Gardner D. Stout was president from 1968 to 1975. Robert G. Goelet from 1975 to 1988. George D. Langdon, Jr. from 1988 to 1993. Ellen V. Futter has been president of the museum since 1993.[13]
Famous names associated with the Museum include the paleontologist and geologist Henry Fairfield Osborn; the dinosaur-hunter of the Gobi Desert, Roy Chapman Andrews (one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones);[7]:97-8 George Gaylord Simpson; biologist Ernst Mayr; pioneer cultural anthropologists Franz Boas and Margaret Mead; explorer and geographer Alexander H. Rice, Jr.; and ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy. J. P. Morgan was also among the famous benefactors of the Museum.
Exhibition halls
The Museum has extensive anthropological collections: Asian People, Pacific People, Man in Africa, American Indian collections, general Native American collections, and collections from Mexico and Central America.
And finally, the Museum's website--
http://www.amnh.org/
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