Opened on September 10, 1932, the 81st Street-Museum of Natural History station is a local stop on the B line with four tracks and two side platforms. However, in this area, the local tracks are stacked, northbound above southbound, and the express tracks are stacked in the same order to the east of them, so both platforms are on the west side, one above the other. The station is at Central Park West and 81st Street rather than the major crosstown 79th Street (though an entrance exists that this street too) to accommodate the American Museum of Natural History, which largely fills what was once Manhattan Square. The 79th Street Transverse Road through Central Park exits the park here. An underground entrance directly to the Museum is at the south end of each platform.
When the station was renovated in the 1990s in coordination with building the new planetarium, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a program of tile mosaics was undertaken, covering the stairs and platforms, extending to floor inlays. Stairwells evoke descents into the geological strata of the Earth (at 81st Street) or into the Ocean (79th Street) and many creatures are evoked in mosaic vignettes that punctuate the stretches of white tiled wall. Fossil casts seem to emerge from the tiles as though the subway platform itself were an excavation, which indeed it is.
Under the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Arts for Transit program, a mixed-media installation was created. Entitled "For Want of a Nail", named after the old proverb, it addresses the interconnections of entities that are as vast as a galaxy and as small as a single cell. Using ceramic tile, glass tile, glass mosaic, bronze relief, and granite as primary materials, the design team depicted the evolution of extinct, existing and endangered life forms—from single celled organisms to the towering T. rex dinosaur. It shows images and symbols ranging from the earth's core, to the sea, the sky and the cosmos beyond. No artist has been identified in this group project.
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The Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt, standing on the John Russell Pope Central Park West Staircase leading up to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) was dedicated on October 27, 1940. Sculptor James Earle Fraser's 10-foot tall bronze statue sits atop architect John Russell Pope's 8-foot, 8-inch high granite base. The work, which was acquired by the City of New York through a provision of the New York state legislature, depicts Teddy Roosevelt on horseback as both a hunter and explorer. He is flanked by the figures of two guides, one Native American and one African, meant to symoblize the continents of America and Africa. The Native American figure is striding forward wearing a feather headdress, moccasins and a long sarong around his waist. The African figure is striding forward with a cloth draped over his proper right shoulder and a gun in his proper right hand. Roosevelt grasps the reins of his horse in his proper left hand and reaches back with his proper right hand as if to grab the gun which he wears in a holster around his waist.
The American Museum of Natural History was founded in 1869. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of Theodore Roosevelt, was one of the founders.
National Register #76001235 (1976)
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The Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt, standing on the John Russell Pope Central Park West Staircase leading up to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) was dedicated on October 27, 1940. Sculptor James Earle Fraser's 10-foot tall bronze statue sits atop architect John Russell Pope's 8-foot, 8-inch high granite base. The work, which was acquired by the City of New York through a provision of the New York state legislature, depicts Teddy Roosevelt on horseback as both a hunter and explorer. He is flanked by the figures of two guides, one Native American and one African, meant to symoblize the continents of America and Africa. The Native American figure is striding forward wearing a feather headdress, moccasins and a long sarong around his waist. The African figure is striding forward with a cloth draped over his proper right shoulder and a gun in his proper right hand. Roosevelt grasps the reins of his horse in his proper left hand and reaches back with his proper right hand as if to grab the gun which he wears in a holster around his waist.
The American Museum of Natural History was founded in 1869. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of Theodore Roosevelt, was one of the founders.
National Register #76001235 (1976)
Tags: NYC New York City Manhattan UWS Upper West Side museum American Museum of Natural History AMNH statue roosevelt teddy roosevelt roughrider sculpture beaux-arts Theodore Roosevelt horseback museum of natural history natural history ny landmark john russell pope central park west staircase New York james earle fraser john russell pope National Register of Historic Places equestrian equestrian statue NRHP U.S. National Register of Historic Places
The American Museum of Natural History was founded in 1869. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of the 26th US President, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of the founders.
The Museum's first home was the old Arsenal building in Central Park. In 1874, ground was broken for the present building, which occupies most of Manhattan Square. The original neo-Gothic range (1874–1877), by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, who were collaborating with Frederick Law Olmsted in structures for Central Park, was soon eclipsed by the South range of the museum, by J. Cleaveland Cady, a robust exercise in rusticated brownstone neo-Romanesque, influenced by H. H. Richardson. A triumphal Roman entrance on Central Park West, completed by John Russell Pope in 1936, is an overscaled Beaux-Arts monument to Teddy Roosevelt. It leads to a vast Roman basilica, where the skeleton of a rearing Barosaurus defending her young from an Allosaurus, is not lost in the general monumentality.
Famous names associated with AMNH have been the paleontologist and geologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, president for many years; the dinosaur-hunter of the Gobi Desert, Roy Chapman Andrews (one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones), George Gaylord Simpson, biologist Ernst Mayr, pioneer cultural anthropologists, Franz Boas and Margaret Mead and ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy. J. P. Morgan was among famous benefactors of the Museum.
The Museum is famous for its habitat groups of African, Asian and North American mammals, for the full-size model of a Blue Whale suspended in the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life (reopened in 2003), for the 62-foot Haida carved and painted war canoe from the Pacific Northwest, and for the "Star of India", the largest blue sapphire in the world. The circuit of a complete floor is devoted to vertebrate evolution, including the world-famous dinosaurs.
The Museum's anthropological collections are also outstanding: Halls of Asian Peoples and of Pacific Peoples, of Man in Africa, Native Americans in the United States collections, general Native American collections, and collections from Mexico and Central America.
National Register #76001235 (1976)
Tags: NYC New York City Manhattan UWS Upper West Side museum American Museum of Natural History AMNH beaux-arts museum of natural history natural history theodore roosevelt roosevelt ny landmark john russell pope central park west staircase New York National Register of Historic Places NRHP U.S. National Register of Historic Places
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