Special Feature—City of Stars

West 81st Street Subway Station

SUN 81st Street station, B & C lines Manhattan

The American Museum of Natural History is one of the privileged places in New York City that can be entered from a subway platform. The south end of the 81st Street station along the B and C lines grants access to the Museum’s lower level. If you exit from the north end of the platform, however, you emerge on Central Park West, in full view of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. During the construction of the Rose Center, just before the turn of the millennium, the city and the Museum worked in tandem to refurbish the entire subway station in a way that would reflect the Museum’s scientific mission. The walls along the south end of the station are now studded with mosaics of reptiles, mammals, fish, bugs, and other critters, as well as with fossil casts of extinct vertebrates, which seem to emerge from the tiles as though the subway platform itself were an excavation site.

GALAXIES 81st Street station

At the bottom of one stairwell on the platform’s north end, the walls are entirely covered with deep blue tiles that represent what one sees in the night sky, including planets, stars of different colors, and constellations. On the walls at the bottom of the adjacent stairwell is an artist’s design for a cross section of the Sun in vibrant orange and yellow tiles—all the way down to its 15-million-degree core. Whoever created this image either didn’t know (or perhaps chose to ignore) that extremely hot things, such as the center of the Sun, glow blue and not red.

Even the platform area near the station’s north-end token booth is a site for astronomical art. Off-white inlays in the beige tile floor depict several fanciful spiral galaxies. In space, of course, galaxies are collections of billions of stars in mutual gravitational embrace; on the subway platform at 81st Street, however, the sickle shapes suggest some sort of weaponry that might be thrown by a master of an obscure martial art.

STAR FIELD 81st Street station

So if you happen to lose touch with your surroundings while riding the train (having entered that semidazed dream state that a subway commute sometimes induces), nature will be staring you in the face when the doors open at 81st Street. And there will be no mistaking that you have arrived at the American Museum of Natural History.

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