Depending on the direction of your approach to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), your first glimpse of the four-block complex on the Upper West Side could involve one of a few different moments in time. If you walk east on 77th St, you’ll be able to peek through trees at an imposing Romanesque facade of pink granite that could easily be a New England liberal arts school. Arrive at the main entrance, on Central Park West, and you’ll be under the shadow of a neoclassical monument to Theodore Roosevelt.
If you arrive on the C train, you’ll be greeted on the platform by whimsical mosaics of lizards climbing and snakes hanging from indigo blue tiles and an arrow pointing toward the museum’s interior entrance. If you ignore them, you will emerge instead on West 81st at a quiet park with a dog run at the foot of a giant glass cube that houses the Rose Center for Earth and Space.
Walk west down 79th, and, as of the time of this writing, you’ll catch the very top of the dramatic slopes of the under-construction Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and I…