April 2025, 3pm — Clear sky, Strong breeze, 50°F

(Tag Line)

American Museum of Natural History's Theodore Roosevelt Park

New York, New York

Theodore Roosevelt Park is reimagined in conversation with the new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. The park’s new design centers it as a powerful neighborhood amenity for daily life on the Upper West Side. Striving for fit with its history and context, the design is carefully calibrated to reinforce connectivity, retain its mature canopy of trees, and better serve the community. This hard-working landscape embraces the 19th century principles of American landscape architecture that are now synonymous with New York’s public spaces, translating a familiar vocabulary to enable the park to serve a 21st century city.

An extended park path immersed in native and adaptive planting leads to a new pedestrian gate, increasing the publicly accessible areas of the park.

From quiet to bustling, commuters, dog walkers, tourists and families gather on terraces, along benches, and spill in from the street dawn until dusk.

A variety of accessible spaces between the street and museum entry increases public open space and exemplifies NYC's “Parks Without Borders” program.

1925

Calvert Vaux's Romantic Walks

1925

Manhattan Square

1980

Theodore Roosevelt Park

2015

Rose Center Construction

2023

Gilder Center & Theodore Roosevelt Park Renewal

History & Evolution

Romantic strolling paths, designed by Calvert Vaux in 1885, long unified the park and afforded generous places for gathering and movement. Incremental museum expansions altered the plan with linear paths that reinforced architectural geometries and focused attention on access and building entries. In contrast, this project is a holistic work of architecture and landscape where the Gilder Center generously builds off the organic forms of the 19th century landscape and the park gently reorients itself to a contemporary moment of museum arrival.

The nearly two-acre, fully accessible renewal unites improvements to plantings, circulation, placemaking, and infrastructure to enhance the overall park experience and function. A broadened, main entrance creates a gradual descent from the street into the park. A new entrance opens to a path flowing diagonally past the museum into the larger park beyond, connecting adjacent spaces along the way. New and expanded gathering areas include paved terraces and seating next to the Nobel Monument, the expanded Margaret Mead Green, and a generous Museum entry plaza.

The design builds on and refines the simple, recognizable vocabulary of NYC Parks past and present, which reads as inherently public.

caption

The museum's first designed landscape was a Romantic park by Calvert Vaux with meandering walks and masses of planting, 1885.

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1 Illustrative Site Plan
2 Concept
3 Stormwater Management Strategy

The design enhances park experience and function, making it more spacious and inclusive through planting, circulation, and placemaking enhancements

Careful manipulation of existing paving expands lawns and gathering areas and works around sensitive roots, bringing continuity to the park.

Permeable cobble swales trace the edges of paths and terraces throughout the park, collecting and directing water into an underground detention area.

Tree Preservation

Preservation of mature trees was a top priority for all. The pervasive high canopy of elms and oaks, yields dappled, cooling shade — one of the park’s most beautiful, character-defining features. The design team carefully oriented the building façade to visually open to the park and nestle it among the majestic trees. A subtle play of figure and ground near the entry reorients the scale of park paths with paving that expands to frame planted islands where notable trees are safely protected and new ones can grow into the park’s future canopy.

Careful planning and the fluid design allowed for adjustments in the field to preserve extensive root systems of mature canopy trees across the site.

A long, arcing east-west path draws visitors through the park’s mature canopy and along new gathering spaces, and to the Museum and city beyond

Plant Palette

The project uses a familiar palette to establish continuity through pervasive planting across the park and reconnect it with the larger Museum campus. Dozens of new trees establish the next generation of the park's iconic canopy above a textured groundplane, and flowering and evergreen shrubs.

The city is framed and filtered through the park's canopy and planting with views, light, and texture changing through the day and across seasons.

Engagement

The project tailored design aspirations to the community’s needs. Our team collaborated with the Museum’s Park Working Group, which was formed in the early stages of the project and operated through construction. The group comprised representatives from offices of elected officials, City agencies (including NYC Parks), and community groups to develop a plan that seamlessly integrated the Gilder Center and the renewed park. This regular and frequent process of intensive collaboration and co-design found common ground to meet the Museum’s mission and the goals of the community.