Unspecified/General

One of the largest natural history museums in the world, the American Museum of Natural History occupies a sprawling complex of around 25 connected buildings on the western edge of Central Park. It was chartered in 1869 and first opened to the public in 1871 inside an existing building in the park, before moving to its permanent site; the cornerstone of the current home was laid by President Grant in 1874 and the first section opened in 1877. Generations of additions since have produced a warren of halls covering more than half a million square feet of exhibition space. The museum is best known for its dioramas and its fossils. Towering dinosaur skeletons fill the fourth-floor halls, a 94-foot model of a blue whale hangs above the Hall of Ocean Life, and the gem collection includes the 563-carat Star of India sapphire, once the target of a famous 1964 jewel heist. The grand Central Park West entrance forms a memorial to Theodore Roosevelt, its rotunda dominated by a rearing Barosaurus skeleton, one of the tallest free-standing dinosaur mounts anywhere. The attached Rose Center for Earth and Space, with its spherical Hayden Planetarium, opened in 2000, and the Gilder Center added curving new galleries in 2023. Roughly five million people pass through each year. A measure of pop-culture fame arrived with the Night at the Museum films, which used the institution as their setting and sent a fresh wave of families toward its dinosaur and mammal halls. Other fixtures include the giant Willamette Meteorite, a carved canoe in the hall devoted to the peoples of the Northwest Coast, and the space shows projected inside the Hayden sphere. Beyond the public galleries, the museum runs a substantial research and education operation, with collections numbering in the tens of millions of specimens that never go on display. For visitors the challenge is usually time rather than interest: the place is large enough that most people see only a fraction in a single trip, and many treat the great dinosaur halls and the hanging whale as the fixed points around which they plan the rest.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: 200 Central Park West, New York City, NY, United States

Telephone: (212) 769-5100

Website: https://www.amnh.org/

Opening Date: 01/01/1877