Rose Center for Earth and Space — planetarium
ESA/Hubble, AMNH · CC BY 4.0

Rose Center for Earth and Space

  • 2 min read
  • 40.782° N 73.973° W

Interesting facts

  • The great sphere appears to float inside its glass cube, but it is actually carried on hidden trusswork; architect James Polshek called the building a cosmic cathedral.
  • Before opening to the public, the nearly finished centre hosted a black-tie millennium party on 31 December 1999, with performances by Philippe Petit and Eartha Kitt.
  • The project cost about $210 million and replaced the original 1935 planetarium, which was demolished in January 1997.
  • The first Hayden Planetarium was paid for largely by a $650,000 federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan, with Charles Hayden adding $150,000.
  • Tom Hanks voiced the opening space show in 2000, and later shows have been narrated by Harrison Ford, Robert Redford, Whoopi Goldberg, Lupita Nyong'o and Pedro Pascal.
  • In the Big Bang Theater the birth of the universe plays out on a screen 36 feet across set over an eight-foot-deep bowl, narrated by Liam Neeson.
  • The planetarium's own magazine, The Sky, later merged with The Telescope to become Sky & Telescope, one of the best-known astronomy magazines.
  • Landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson based the adjoining Arthur Ross Terrace on an illustration of shadows cast during a lunar eclipse; it won an ASLA design award in 2003.
  • The old planetarium is where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton take shelter from a sudden downpour in the 1979 film Manhattan.
  • On New Year's Eve 2001 Peter Jennings anchored ABC's reflective post-9/11 celebration broadcast live from the Rose Center.

Why it is worth it

The Rose Center for Earth and Space is the part of New York's American Museum of Natural History that turns the cosmos into architecture. Designed by James Polshek and Todd Schliemann of the Polshek Partnership and opened in February 2000, it is a six-storey glass cube on the north side of the museum, and inside it a white sphere 87 feet across seems to hang in the air. After dark, lit from within and seen from West 81st Street, the whole composition reads like a planet held in a display case.

The sphere is the new home of the Hayden Planetarium, an institution founded in 1935 with money from the banker Charles Hayden. Its upper part holds the planetarium dome; the lower half is the Big Bang Theater, which recreates the first moments of the universe. Visitors leave it along the Heilbrunn Cosmic Pathway, a 360-foot ramp spiralling around the sphere that lays out some 13 billion years of cosmic history, so that all of human existence occupies a sliver at the very end. Along the glass walls, the Scales of the Universe exhibit uses the sphere itself as a yardstick, comparing it with models of atoms, planets and stars.

Below, the Cullman Hall of the Universe displays the Willamette meteorite, an iron mass of about 32,000 pounds, and the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth shows the rocks and processes that built the planet. The centre made headlines soon after it opened when its displays of the solar system left out Pluto, years before astronomers formally reclassified it. Neil deGrasse Tyson has been the Hayden Planetarium's director since the 1990s, the first to hold that title.

Getting there

The Rose Center is part of the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, facing Central Park; its entrance is on West 81st Street. LaGuardia Airport (LGA) is about 8.5 km away as the crow flies. The 81st Street–Museum of Natural History subway station on the B and C lines connects directly with the building underground.

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On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in New York 17The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Remarkable Planetariums 3The Most Remarkable Places for Stargazing and Science 4

From the encyclopaedia

The Rose Center for Earth and Space is a part of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The Center's complete name is The Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space. The main entrance is located on the northern side of the museum on 81st Street near Central Park West in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Completed in 2000, it includes the Hayden Planetarium, which was originally opened in 1935. Neil deGrasse Tyson is its first and, to date, only director.

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