American Museum of Natural History

One of the most impressive parts of the Museum of Natural History in New York City is the Hayden Sphere within the Rose Centre for Space. It serves as a planetarium and exhibition space (although the latter was closed at the height of the summer holiday), but also as an extremely good tool for an exhibit all about scale in the universe, from galaxy superclusters to atoms. Sadly, the rest of the museum just wasn’t up to scratch and I found myself deeply disappointed by the whole place, so much so that I find myself trying to search for positives to balance out the negative experience I had there.

American Museum of Natural History

Admission is on a pay-what-you-want basis, but if you don’t want to pay the recommended $16 you have to join the long queue of people waiting to be served. We chose to use the faster ticket machines, and I mistakenly selected a senior ticket rather than a student ticket for my friend. It didn’t mean any change of price ($12 for each category) but it didn’t matter anyway. They didn’t check our tickets as we walked in, and I could have just held up a receipt for anything for all it mattered. Security was a joke and the ticket inspectors were as bored as the rest of the staff.

Out on the floors there were big exhibits offline (such as the Big Bang in the Hayden Sphere) and several touchscreens that were not working or even smashed. One set of three videos had one rotated left, one right and one upside-down and all at least six inches below the line they should be. Plenty of places had inscriptions marked ‘press here’ and no buttons to press, or signboards that you could get your hand inside. Believe me, the metal underneath was sharp, and could be a potential litigation point should anyone else realise this.

One big beef I had was the lack of signage about the place – I ended up having to go back out through the ticket barriers to find the toilets, necessitating another useless waving of my receipt in the guard’s general direction. Another interactive that can be spun to show cloud motion on planets had absolutely nothing to tell visitors what it was, so they just span it and that was it. Staff were few and far between, mostly looking bored and none really looking too outgoing.

The museum’s signboards also seemed to assert that there was some problem with the definition of a planet, trying to edge Pluto somewhat unscientifically back into the club. There were also flashing lights where there didn’t need to be (for example for demonstrating the process for fusing hydrogen into helium) and not in other places. There were plenty of places to shop, however, and you could purchase Astronaut Barbie with a variety of hair colours should you wish it.

The rest of the museum looks old and desperately needs updating. The exhibit signs for example in the New York state wildlife area are very dated and would do well for a change of font and a lick of paint. The biodiversity exhibition was horrendously underlit, and several text boxes were impossible to read. In the human evolution section the lit text panels were flickering enough to make my friend feel ill.

For the good points, they had a big screen with the latest scientific news in the Rose Centre, and also within Biodiversity. The human evolution section was very well done indeed, and as I said earlier I thought the use of the Hayden Sphere as a reference point on the scaling exhibit was excellent: ‘if the Hayden Sphere was the size of x, the model in front of you is the size of y’, and so on. This was a very tangible and appreciable way to put things in perspective. The meteorite hall too contained some excellent articles, and I was very impressed with the range of rocks and the text that accompanied them.

I went back to the museum to watch ‘Sonic Visions’ a 35-minute long series of pop/rock/electronic tracks set to psychedelic visuals on the planetarium dome. It’s a beautiful planetarium, and I’m sure given the right audience it could be a hit. The trouble was that it became too samey, and after 10 minutes I wanted to see something different, using more of the space within. I expected better, especially considering the excellent astronomy shows the AMNH exports.

Once again, here was an institution that did not return my emails, which annoyed me. I know it’s the summer, and that means the busy period, but it doesn’t do these places any good to ignore their clientele. Very disappointing as a whole museum – I’m sure that there is plenty of excellent material within those many walls, but sadly I missed it behind the overall experience.