The American Museum of Natural History Manhattan Square 15
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The American Museum '· of Natural History . and How It Got That Way 1 Manhattan Square et's start by looking at what life was like in New York City in 1872, l the year the museum was given its home on Eighth Avenue (now Central Park West) opposite Central Park, on a site then known as Manhattan Square (renamed Theodore Roosevelt Park in 1958). The United States comprised only thirty-seven states. Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth president, sat in the White House just six years after the end of the Civil War, the excruciating conflict that had made the former general a household name. New York City consisted only of Manhattan. The boroughs beyond would not become part of the larger metropolis until 1898. Although construction had begun on the Brooklyn Bridge, it would not open for more than a decade. And even after thirteen years of construction, Central Park itself was still not quite complete. According to the New York historians Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fish• man, "though by 1865 New York was the nation's largest city, it was still provincial by international standards."1 Nor did Manhattan Square seem an ideal site for such an ambitious project. In his autobiography, Albert S. Bickmore, the museum's founder, wrote, "The first time I visited the square it seemed an almost hopeless task that we were undertaking" because the terrain was so forbidding, dotted with high rocky hills, and the location so desolate.2 To someone familiar with the flat, manicured grounds on which the museum sits today, the square would hardly be recognizable. The museum geologist Louis Gratacap described "a rugged, disconsolate tract of ground . 13 14 The American Museum of Natural History Manhattan Square 15 81st Street Albert Bickmore: "The first was rising nearby, it was suggested that the apartment building was so time I visited the square it named because Manhattan's Upper West Side seemed as remote as seemed an almost hopeless America's Dakota Territory, soon to become the states of North and cask that we were under• South Dakota. taking .... There was a high hill at the north east corner [a] ... in the north west The Growth of Manhattan and the Creation corner another hill of solid of Central Park GI n rock rose much higher than :i ~ C :i the elevated railroad station, Nonetheless, the early history of New York City was one of relentless ~ ..... <C !!!. which now stands in its place northward expansion. From the time of the original Dutch settlement .. ,, ... (The Columbus Avenue in 1624 to the Revolutionary War in 1776, the streets of New York :i Ill .Q ... E ~ El train to which he refers occupied the southernmost sliver of Manhattan Island, scarcely stretch• :i no longer exists] In the 0 f ing above Wall Street. The following decades would witness a steady u ~ southern and central part northward expansion, and by 1811 the streets extended roughly to of the square (b], just where Greenwich Village, covering about a fifth of the island. Because expan• the first section of our sion was haphazard, the resulting street organization was chaotic, and it building was co be erected, to was a third hill, whose crest remains so this day in Lower Manhattan. rose as high as the ceiling of To rectify this, the city commissioners developed a plan, adopted in our present Hall of Birds," at 1811, intended to guide the city's inevitable northward growth. The the time on the second floor plan organized the undeveloped portion of the island into an orderly 77th Street ("Autobiography," 2:29-30). 1870 map of Manhattan Square's topography, with the [cj Hayden Planetarium/Rose current American Museum of Natural History floor plan as Center for earth and space. an overlay. Note the lake. Source: First annual report of the BCDPP (1871), 276. where the gneiss ledges protruded their weathered shapes ... filled with stagnant pools."? And the site was also far from the masses that Bickmore hoped to attract. The adjoining neighborhoods of the Upper East and West Sides were largely undeveloped and unpopulated, with most of the city's residents living below Fifty-Ninth Street, Central Park's southern boundary. During Bickrnore's first visit, he recalled, his "only compan• ions were scores of goats," adding, "Only the temporary shanties of squatters could be seen on the north, except two or three srn.all and Manhattan Square in 1811, from "Map of the city of New York and island of cheap houses half way between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. On the west Manhattan, as laid out by the commissioners appointed by the legislature, April were only shanties perched on the rough rocks, and south of us there 3d, 1807." was no building near."4 Even a decade later, when the famous Dakota Source: Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 16 The American Museum of Natural History Manhattan Square 17 grid of rectangular blocks reaching north all the way to 155th Street. Board of Education and was reelected the following year. In 1858, he Over the next century, Manhattan developed largely as envisioned by declined to seek or accept the presidency again.12 the 1811 plan, with one major exception-the addition of Central Park. Although Green had accepted the position of Central Park commis• The commissioners saw no need for a major public park, and more sioner reluctantly,13 he quickly became the group's most active member.14 than four decades would pass before Central Park would be added to Within two months ofj oining the body, he became its first treasurer, and the cityscape. However, the plan did include several small "squares," on May 10, 1858, while also serving as treasurer, he became president.15 including Manhattan Square, 5 and as a result, the future home of the One of the commission's first acts was to hold a design competition American Museum existed long before the idea of Central Park was for the park. There were thirty-three submissions, and on April 28, 1858, 6 conceived. the commission chose as the winner the "Greensward plan" of Frederick One of the earliest calls for a major public park for the city came in Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Both men already had history with 1844 from William Cullen Bryant, the lawyer, poet, and editor of the Central Park. Olmsted had become the park's superintendent the pre• New York Evening Post: "Commerce is devouring inch by inch the coast vious autumn, and Vaux had been instrumental in the decision to hold of the island," Bryant wrote in an editorial, "and if we would rescue any a design competition in the first place.16 part of it for health and recreation it must be done now. All large cities On September 15, 1859, the Central Park Commission created the have their extensive public ground and gardens, Madrid, and Mexico position of comptroller/treasurer, the group's only paid position and one their Alamedas, London its Regent's Park, Paris its Champs Elysees, and earmarked specifically for Green. At that point, he gave up his law prac• Vienna its Prater."7 As the New York Times architecture critic Paul Gold• tice to focus on the park, in the process taking control over every aspect berger would point out a century and a half later, "New York, it was of its construction and day-to-day operations.17 As Green rose through said in the 1840s ... had nothing in the way of public open space to the ranks, he developed a reputation as an austere, incorruptible, and per• compare with the great cities of Europe, and if the city was truly to suasive public servant. He maintained an active interest in education for become the international metropolis it took pleasure in seeing itself as, the rest of his life, and it showed in his vision for Central Park.18 something had to be done."8 The movement gathered steam, and on July 21, 1853, the New York State Legislature passed the Central Park Act, authorizing the city to Early Plans for Museums and Educational buy the 778 acres bounded by Fifty-Ninth Street on the south, 106th Institutions in the Park Street on the north (later extended to 110th Street), Eighth Avenue on Park planners had intended to include museums and other educational the west, and Fifth Avenue on the east.? institutions in the new park even before the park's location was selected. In fact, one factor in the selection of Central Park's location was the Andrew Haswell Green and the Board possibility that it could house institutions of this type. of Commissioners of Central Park On January 2, 1852, a special committee released a report comparing the merits of two sites for a public park: Central Park and an area near the Nearly four years later, on April 17, 1857, the State Legislature estab• East River known as Jones Park.19 One point in Central Park's favor, the lished the Board of Commissioners of Central Park and appointed eleven committee concluded, was that the "grounds admit numerous adaptations men to the board, among them an exceptionally civic-minded New for ornamental or scientific purposes (as the erection of observatories, or Yorker named Andrew Haswell Green.'? museums, or the formation of a botanic garden, and various other objects), Green, a lawyer, was a protege of the prominent Democratic politi• for which 'Jones' Wood' would be too small, and, by reason of its prox• cian Samuel]. Tilden." Green's career in public office began in Novem• imity to the river, ill adapted.'?" ber 1854, when he was elected to New York City's Board of Education, The specifications for the Central Park design competition had serving from 1855 to 1860, a period that overlapped with his time as a required "at least one institution of cultural uplift or practical commissioner of Central Park.