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 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. Its 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 high 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. (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 survives inside the shell of the Rose Space Center, 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 outside the fountain court of the new Space Center / Planetarium in TWD, noting that the fountains come on at 6:45 AM. (HW, TWD et al.)