There’s no better way to celebrate fall than to observe bird migration on an eight-week series of walks through Central Park with Museum naturalists Stephen C. Quinn, Joseph DiCostanzo, and Harold Feinberg. Leading groups of up to 25 birders, these experienced tour guides teach participants to use field marks, habitat, behavior, and song to identify birds. Check out a video of a bird walk led by Stephen Quinn below.
Many visitors may not realize it, but when they walk through the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians, the Hall of African Peoples, the Leonard C. Sanford Hall of North American Birds, and the Hall of Vertebrate Origins they are actually visiting the Museum’s very first building at its current site. The multi-story Victorian Gothic structure, which opened to the public in 1877, was designed by two prominent architects of the time, Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, both of whom were involved in the planning of Central Park and design of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other projects. (The architectural legacy of Jacob Wrey Mould, including his work at the American Museum of Natural History, was explored in a May 12 “Streetscapes” article in The New York Times.)
When President Ulysses S. Grant laid the cornerstone for that first building in 1874, the Museum’s collection was on display at the old Arsenal building on the eastern side of Central Park but fast outgrowing the space. An area between 77th and 81st Streets, known as Manhattan Square, which had been previously set aside by the city as a possible location for a zoo or botanical garden, was secured by the Museum as the site for a full-scale natural history museum. After three years of construction, the completed building was dedicated at a ceremony presided over by another president, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Manhattan Square became home to “the most prominent building on the West Side,” according to Robert A. M. Stern’s book, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age.
As the Museum’s collections grew and more space was needed for exhibition and, increasingly, scientific research, additional buildings were put up alongside Vaux and Mould’s core structure. Over time, 25 distinct, interconnected buildings would spread out over four city blocks. In the process, the original Victorian Gothic façade vanished behind what is now known as the “castle” façade on 77th Street, designed in the Romanesque Revival style by another noted architect, Josiah Cleveland Cady. Read more »
