Here’s a question I contemplated as I helped my daughter lead my twin year-and-a-half granddaughters through the American Museum of Natural History last week: do the museum’s famous dioramas pack the same punch, have a similar transporting effect on the current generation that they did on me when I was a child?
My earliest memories include visits to the museum. Frankly, my most profound memory is of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, probably my first, in the museum cafeteria. But coming in a close second were those dioramas of zebra and gazelle on the vast Serengeti or bison grazing the Great Plains. Whether they were real or fake was incidental. The childhood imagination made no such distinctions. You were simply swept up in the tableau. You became part of the scene. Were it not for the sheet of glass standing between you and the animals there was little doubt that if whatever caregiver happened to be accompanying you allowed you do, you could fully enter the picture plain and explore.
Of course, you wouldn’t because you’d be in hostile territory. You’d probably get eaten right up. Better to remain in the safety on your side of the spectacle. But that delicious scene of danger and possibility only made the illusion all that much more real.
It’s probably premature to wonder what the twins impression is and whether it’s different and less vivid than mine, in a world now filled with augmented reality and artificial intelligence competing for their attention. After all, they’re speaking words but not yet stringing them into sentences. Illusion and reality remain one and the same to them.
But my hunch is that once they get it together — say at three or four years old — the dioramas will pack the same punch they once did, and frankly still do, for me. Just because we’ve got TV and the movies doesn’t make visiting the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum and gazing upon a Rembrandt or a Da Vinci any less potent. Genius is genius. One could argue the same at the American Museum of Natural History. Those dioramas constitute the pinnacle of the taxidermist’s and scene painter’s art.
We entered the museum not through the main entrance on Central Park West but through the new Richard Gilder Center for Science. I’m not crazy about its appearance, at least from outdoors. With its whitish walls and curvy facade it clashes with the rest of the museum. But once inside the atrium its hard not to get swept up in the experience. The cavernous space soars five stories and includes an insectarium and a live butterfly vivarium, neither of which words, surprisingly, is triggering spellcheck.
My daughter, the twins’ mom Lucy, worked at the museum for five years. As she observed that’s proved useful during visits because she doesn’t need to waste a lot of time finding where things are located. That might not sound like a big deal. But when you’re dealing with not one but two one-year-olds with minds very much of their own, typically heading in opposite directions, you prefer to keep unknowns to a minimum.
We started at the insectarium, which is cool, especially if you’re into bugs but quickly made our way to the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. I don’t recall every exhibition space being associated with a billionaire during my childhood — the Griffin Exploration Atrium, the Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium — but the history of Capitalism wasn’t foremost on my mind.
The Hall of Ocean Life is dark, I suppose in keeping with the briny deep, which would have been fine with me were I not charged with policing Aggie or Faye — I can’t remember which one it was — while she ambled among pearl divers, giant squid, and great white sharks. Lucy and I agreed that neither of the girls probably had any idea that there was a ninety-six foot long blue whale hanging overhead.
Yet it was the restored Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals that stole the show. The Alaskan moose locking antlers. The muscular jaguar peaking over some vertiginous sunset Mexican precipice. And probably most famously the wolf pack hunting by the Northern Lights.
Aggie and Faye seemed appropriately awed. Then again, pretty much everything awes them at this age as well it should. It’s that sense of awe that one risks losing over time and that one should take every opportunity to make happen no matter their age. Those dioramas still do it for me and not because they trigger childhood memories but because they hold up. They’re still cool.
Still, it doesn’t hurt to have small kids in tow that are operating with fewer filters. I look forward to returning to the museum with them soon and frequently. Both for their sake and mine.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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