Hayden Planetarium
The planetarium associated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and which features in two of the YW books. The Hayden is located at Central Park West and 81st Street.
The Planetarium was founded in 1933 with funds from New York State and philanthropist Charles Hayden. The building, a handsome Art Deco-influenced structure with a copper-sheathed dome, was opened to the public in 1935.
The planetarium's magazine, The Sky, started publication in the mid-30's and was later merged with the magazine Telescope: the successor magazine, Sky and Telescope, survives today as one of the premier magazines of professional and amateur astronomy. (DD has said that a subscription to this magazine, given to her as a birthday present when she was eight years old, was the source of her lifelong fascination with astronomy.)
One of the most famous directors of the Planetarium during its first half-century was Robert Coles, who was
instrumental in increasing the planetarium's public profile. He hosted the first symposium in astronautics in the US at the Planetarium in 1951, bringing together for the first time experts such as Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun, whose vision and expertise later came to underlie the earliest incarnations of NASA. (It is one of life's more interesting coincidences that Coles was DD's astronomy teacher in elementary school.) Coles worked to enhance the Planetarium by expanding its exhibition space to include such artifacts as the Ahnighito Meteorite, with which Kit communes briefly in HW. (The meteorite, at thirty-two tons the largest one held in any museum, is now in the adjacent Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites.)
Over the next fifty years the Planetarium continued to thrive, but toward the end of the century was outgrowing its 1930's shell. A massive $20 million grant from Mr. and Mrs. Frederick P. Rose allowed a spectacular new astronomy and space center to be built around the original planetarium. The Hayden -- now completely refurbished and equipped with a state-of-the-art Zeiss star projector -- survives inside the transparent glass shell of
the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a structure now widely hailed as an architectural masterpiece.
In HW, it's inside the older version of the Hayden that Kit and Nita lose track of Dairine. The sign on the wall near the door through which Dairine passes on her way to the High Road --
labeled "To Mars, Venus, and Ladies' Room" -- has unfortunately been lost during the refurbishment and reconstruction of the facility.
Nita stops briefly at the new Space Center's Arthur Ross Terrace in TWD, while hunting for the kernel of the "practice New York" in aschetic space. The fountain, by landscape artist Kathryn Gustafson, flows from one end of its basin to the other, across a mosaic including thousands of tiny embedded mirror tiles representing the stars of the night sky. The stars of the constellation Orion shine out of the basin courtesy of embedded fiber optics. (HW, TWD et al.)