to the Arsenal Building in Central 
Park. In 1871 the Museum and its 
sister institution, the Metropolitan 
Museum of Art, jointly petitioned the 
state legislature for land and buildings 
to permanently house and display their 
expanding collections. The petition, 
signed by 40,000 prominent New 
Yorkers, was speedily accepted, and 
the city offered the Museum a patch 
of land — which was known at the time 
as Manhattan Square — adjacent to 
Central Park. 
The Parks Department had been 
considering turning this tract into an 
extravagant zoological park, complete 
with bear pits and a museum of pa- 
leontological reconstructions. When 
The American Museum took it over, 
it was a dismal site, indeed. As Louis 
Gratacap, a curator in the young Mu- 
seum, wrote: 
This region comprised eighteen acres 
which had been reserved for a park, years 
before the design of a Central Park was 
suggested. It included a rugged, discon- 
solate tract of ground, thrown into hillocks 
where the gneiss ledges protruded their 
weathered shapes, or depressed in hollows 
filled with stagnant pools, and bearing 
throughout an uncompromising, scarcely 
serviceable appearance. 
The elevated railroad did not then ex- 
tend beyond 59th Street, the present 
bridge over the walled bridlepath into the 
Park was not yet built, and the Museum 
thus stood isolated both from the Park 
and from the populous city. The region 
around was compounded in its pictorial 
aspect of several discordant yet pictur- 
esque elements; it embraced old farms, 
ruinous landmarks of ancient New York, 
brand new stores, sanitary modern ten- 
ements, bewildering mazes of hovels clus- 
tered together over swelling knobs of 
rocky ledges, and pretty kitchen gardens 
lying in its deep depressions. The banks 
of the Hudson retained in places woods 
as old as New Amsterdam, and the daily 
stage which rolled up the spacious boul- 
evard to Manhattanville added a sugges- 
tive touch of antiquity to all. 
The first improvement to the site 
was the unceremonious eviction of the 
picturesque squatters with their goats 
and pigs. The trustees hired Calvert 
Vaux, one of the designers of Central 
Park, as the architect of the fledgling 
Museum. Vaux came up with a mag- 
nificent plan, calling for a building 
three times larger than the British Mu- 
seum. According to a report submitted 
to the trustees, Vaux “contemplated 
for the entire edifice a hollow square 
whose sides were to be formed of four 
great buildings 700 feet long, ornate 
in material and detail, and distin- 
guished by large entrances of archi- 
tectural dignity and strength.” The 
hollow square would contain two long 
buildings that crossed in the center, 
forming four courtyards. The center 
of the structure would have an enor- 
mous tower rising up to the heavens, 
which appropriately would contain the 
Hall of the Heavens. Jacob Wrey 
Mould, J.C. Cady, and other archi- 
tects enlarged upon and embellished 
Vaux’s plan. 
On June 2, 1874, Pres. Ulysses S. 
Grant laid the cornerstone of the new 
building. He was attended by a flock 
of important officials, including three 
cabinet members, the governor, and 
the mayor. It must have been an odd 
sight, with the remaining squatters 
and livestock looking on as Grant trow- 
eled the cornerstone and time capsule 
into place (the trowel was stolen a 
few moments later, proof that the good 
old days of New York were not as 
flight from USA 
SEA 
Discover with Dr. Thomas D. Nicholson, 
Director of the Museum, and six other 
expert lecturers the paradise islands of 
Southeast Asia. (Your traveling faculty 
will include an art historian, anthropolo- 
gist, astronomer, geologist/volcanologist, 
marine biologist and ornithologist.) 
Discover extraordinary Hindu-Buddhist 
temples of Bali, Lombok and Java. . . 
ancient Sultan’s Palaces. . and the 
unique hanging cliff graves of the Stone 
Age Tana Toradja on Sulawesi. 
Name 
(please print) 
Address 
State 
Central Park West at 79th St. New York, NY 10024 
Please send an itinerary for the Indonesian Odyssey to 
American 
Museum of 
Natural 
History 
Discovery Tours 
Tel. (212) 873-1440 
B AL 
flight to USA 
94 
