Hosted by Tom Brokaw, this episode gives viewers an unprecedented, inside look at the Museum and the recent renovations of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial and the Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals.
I’m now 71 and I remember going to this museum with my father when I was 7 years old. It was such a grand trip for me as I never got to be alone without my siblings but on this memorable day I was. It was just Daddy and me... a little girl with patent leather Mary Jane shoes holding her Daddy’s hand amazed by what she saw and heard. I did not know it but we were poor. I had been taught not to ask for anything at any time, anywhere. So when my Dad offered to rent the headphones for the dioramas I was shocked and delighted. I kept taking them off saying Daddy listen too. What a marvelous day. At the end of the day my Dad took me into the museum store and bought me a paperback book about dinosaurs which I treasure till this very day. Thank you for this museum where do much is taught and treasured.
Thank you for sharing your beautiful story .I actually felt like I was walking around in the crowd ,looking at all the exhibits, you clutching your new crisp paperback. You must have been wearing the biggest brightest and proudest smile of the museum
You'll never see it all in a day, you can start when they open the doors, and sill won't complete your tour by closing time. It's the best museum I've ever been into in my life.
Very true. As a matter of fact if you TRY to take it all in on one day you will become exhausted and wont enjoy it as much. We did that the first time decades ago and by the end of the day we were not enjoying it. We went again years later and spent most of the time just viewing what we didnt see or was more interesting and that was more enoyable.
googleboyny very true it's like battle fatigue. It's all enthralling while on your sofa but when the walking and standing and hunger and restroom searches and more walking and more standing and... Better to do a highlights run or a particular hall destination for a season by season romp.
Agreed. I tried to do exactly that this weekend. I spent from 10 o'clock, opening time, to 5 forty-five, closing time, here one day, and then four hours more the next (all the time that I had in New York), and I still felt that I had only scratched the surface. I feel that really, one day per floor is necessary. *Maybe* floors 3 and 4 can be combined in a day, but floor 1 and floor 2 absolutely require each a day of their own. (And that's not even counting the space/cosmos extension to the museum.) Agreed that it's the best single museum in the world. (The Prussian collections in Berlin alone can surpass it, but they're divided into multiple separate museums.)
I've been going to this museum since before I can remember and it never gets old. I love this museum and the memories I have of it. I hope more people get to have the same experiences!
I'm a Brit and have never been to the museum. However, when I was a child in the 70s I read the book Catcher in the Rye, in which a teen boy spends the day wandering around NY including the museum. He explains some of the exhibits in detail (as they were in the 50s when the book was written).
I grew up in NYC and loved going to the museum when I was a kid. The diorama was always my favorite part. I've been there a million times and still never saw every part. I reckon there are very few people who can say they have been to every single part, on every floor, of that huge structure. So many iconic places in NYC, like the Central Park Zoo or skating at Rockefeller Center in the winter, were familiar places I loved going to as a kid. Great city to grow up in. But, as any New Yorker knows, the city is a double-edged sword. Now, I live in the UK and look out my window with a view of horses in fields. I'd rather have my UK view over a penthouse view in NY any day.
To be honest, I was moved to tears of gratitude for our dear Theodore Roosevelt. They're very right had he not protected these immensely glorious wild areas, all that beauty would have been transformed into vast, ugly, grey, soul-eating, concrete jungles of modernity. Enormous wastelands of industry and broken people. Thank you so much for posting this Treasure of New York video I really appreciate it and God bless you for sharing this experience with me.
This was my favorite place as a kid. I can't even tell you how many times I have been there. It is a shame, however, that they replaced the life size fish with television screens. What made this place so magical was that it was so never changing. And I think that kids respond more to those dioramas than they do to the technological modernizations. Kids get enough TV at home.
I can still remember as a very little boy climbing onto the herd of Elephants sculpture, and standing in that incredible place for just a few moments until my father realized where I was! I still keep that memory with me and have taken countless friends, family, and lovers to that wonderful museum over time. I have to say it's better now than ever, one of the great jewels of New York City...GO!
We knew it was a very special place even as children. How lucky we were to have access to such a great museum. We loved the dinosaurs and the big Kodiak bear the most.
It's 2019 and this is more relevent than ever. TR, could you please make a guest appearence at the WH and say hi to DT, and remind him what it means to protect our country and it's natural resources.
As far as dioramas go, they never showed the sea life dioramas which are equally stupendous. Whenever I've shown out-of-towners around, this museum has always been number one on the sight-seeing list. Growing up, I'd gone here every couple of years whether with others or alone. It plain didn't matter.
if u live in nyc, you've taken at least 3 field trips here by 5th grade. It's not until now that I'm finally gonna be choosing to go in my adult life, I'm so excited! I wish covid hadn't closed the Hayden Planetarium though!
Gosh, this was done before the museum decided to remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt, one of the greatest presidents. He plays a big role in this video. So very sad that a great institution would cave to a bunch of Jacobins and dishonor itself!
It was done by the will of the people of the city and with the blessing of his descendant, Teddy Roosevelt IV. It was an American decision process, and it wasn’t destroyed, merely moved.
This is a great documentary, I really enjoyed it. It reminded me of all the reasons I love museums. I'm looking forward to visiting for the first time in March.
I rem.going to the Hayden Planetarium as a kid.Its huge projector look like a giant ant.That was an interesting building.Woody Allen used its interior in his movie Manhattan in one of the scenes with Diane Keaton.
When I was a kid this was my favorite place in the world and as I got older I coud go here and then later walk 15 or 20 blocks uo Central Park West to The Dakota and the Strawberry Fields John Lennon Memorial.
I remember when i first came to this Museum on a field trip with my school in 1965 in the 4th grade it was beautiful, they did a lot of changing since then.
I remember I went with my family to new York, but I forgot what year we had gone, but we went to the natural museum, it was very neat to see all the animal's very life like! 😦 it was cool! ☺🐇🐰🐮🐴🐧🐂🐼🐻🐯🐆🐨🐵🐆
è muito lindo! Me faz lembrar quando morava no interior. Muitas saudades. e quanto ao Museu;é a expressão de um povo que luta por suas necessidades e sonhos,e o fazem acontecer atravéz de muito trabalho e organização,(maravilhoso)
As far as human terms go, the Earth will be here forever and will have beautiful vistas and diverse magnificent creatures with or without us. An eternal Eden in a sea of cold darkness. Thanks God
30:00 I lost any word I can say 'service' I would never be able to agree with that... and feel guilty I mean elephant lives so long and they remember their friends and families. I could never be reason with that not truly
We used to have a beautiful museum a lot like this in San Francisco, The Academy of Sciences. Sadly it was demolished and replaced by an abomination that more resembles the interior of an Apple store, now I have to visit New York to remember what it was like.
+xa baz "Dioramas of this sort are really the life blood of the natural history museum". :) (good luck on your script! BTW, you can turn on captions on the video to help you out.
My first trip to the museum as a kid I remember looking at the dioramas of a bear eating a fish and I saw the guts and got sick and almost threw up. Lol
