Dinosaurs in the Attic Read Online Free PDF Page B

buildings to house and display their collections permanently. The petition, signed by 40,000 New Yorkers, persuaded city politicians to offer the American Museum a sixteen-acre parcel of land known as Manhattan Square, adjacent to Central Park on 79th Street. (Manhattan Square had been planned as a park well before the creation of Central Park, but as of 1871 remained undeveloped.) When the Museum took possession, it was a dismal and positively wild site indeed. As Louis Garatacap, a curator in the young Museum, wrote: "It included a rugged, disconsolate 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."

    In that period of the late nineteenth century, it was also a very isolated site. The elevated railway that would soon run along what is now Columbus avenue had not been extended farther than 59th Street, and the bridge connecting Manhattan Square with Central Park (now called the Naturalists' Gate) had not yet been built. The area around the Museum, now the fashionable Upper West Side, was then undergoing the painful process of development. It was a ramshackle patchwork of rundown farms, tenements, rocky outcrops, foul swamps, and undeveloped tracts clustered with vegetable gardens and the hovels of squatters.

    Before building could begin on Manhattan Square, a dozen or more squatters had to be unceremoniously removed from the site, along with their herds of goats and pigs. Then the trustees of the new Museum hired Calvert Vaux, one of the designers of Central Park, to be the architect of the fledgling Museum. Vaux contemplated a Museum of lofty and stupendous dimensions. The edifice was to be a hollow square seven hundred feet along each side, containing two long buildings that crossed in the center, forming four interior courtyards. The center of the structure would be an enormous tower called—appropriately enough—the Hall of the Heavens. Oacob Wrey Mould, J. C. Cady, and other architects would later add details to and alter the plan.)

    On June 2, 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant laid the cornerstone for the new building. He was attended by a flock of important officials, including three cabinet members, the governor, and the mayor (as well as a group of curious squatters who had remained throughout the construction.) The ceremony opened with a rousing prayer by a Reverend Tyng, followed by an address by the president of the commissioners of Central Park, who alluded rather apologetically to the forbidding landscape:

To the stranger who comes here to-day these rugged foundation walls and these rough surroundings are not well calculated to make a pleasant impression; but to us who have watched the rapid growth northward of this city, and who were familiar with the barren and rocky ground upon which Central Park has been created, it requires but little strain of the imagination to conceive of the speedy occupation of all these vacant lots by substantial dwellings, and to picture to ourselves the spot upon which we now stand, known as Manhattan Square, as covered by the proposed Museum of Natural History, costing, ere its final completion, not less than $6,000,000, and embracing a collection of objects of scientific interest second to none other in the world.

    All was silent as Grant troweled the cornerstone and time capsule into place. The trowel, a little silver affair supplied by Tiffany's, was stolen moments later. *4

    The first building was opened to the public on December 22, 1877, with President Rutherford B. Hayes presiding. It was an austere Victorian structure that looked out upon a landscape of rubble, undrained ponds, and piles of rock. An early photograph of the Museum, taken from the roof of the Dakota Building, †5 shows the Museum standing in this wasteland, with a number of shanties, gardens, and various animals still inhabiting