The American Museum of Natural History Opens Its First Building

On December 22, 1877, the American Museum of Natural History opened its first permanent building, a Victorian Gothic structure going up on Manhattan Square, the raw parkland on the Upper West Side now known as Theodore Roosevelt Park. President Rutherford B. Hayes traveled up for the ceremony, following President Ulysses S. Grant, who had turned over the first dirt at the site's groundbreaking three years before. The museum itself was nearly a decade older than the building. Naturalist Albert S. Bickmore had been pushing the idea since 1861, and Governor John T. Hoffman finally signed it into law on April 6, 1869, after which the young collection sat crowded into the old Arsenal building in Central Park. Architects Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould, the same pair behind much of Central Park's own design, drew up the new Manhattan Square building, and prominent New Yorkers raised the money to build it before a single visitor walked through the door.