UPPER WEST SIDE — The American Museum of Natural History had a host of executives and architects on hand to explain the museum's expansion at a public meeting Thursday night, but it also invited its star scientist — Neil deGrasse Tyson — who had plenty to say about his employer's plans.
DeGrasse Tyson, the director of the museum's Hayden Planetarium, spoke passionately about the museum's need to expand and the way his own trip to the museum at age 9 influenced the course of his life and his decision to become an astrophysicist.
"The museum kept feeding me and I kept growing," he said.
Exhibits like those planned within the new Gilder Center, which the museum plans to open in 2019, will give visitors an immersive experience, "the kind of life-changing moment that so many people who have become scientists have experienced," he said.
But deGrasse Tyson said that while he supports the current plan, he was watching carefully to see what the museum would do when it first announced the center back in December 2014.
Museum officials have said that according to an early master plan, they have the right to expand onto all of Theodore Roosevelt Park, the surrounding public park — a bone of serious contention with locals who oppose any loss of parkland.
"Would there be some aggressive land grab of the park?" deGrasse Tyson told residents he had wondered.
Instead, he said he was impressed by the process that unfolded and the public discourse.
Instead of a "land grab," he said, "I saw a very sensitive compromise... this is democracy at its finest," he told the crowd.
Democracy is not "warring factions and one wins and one loses," said deGrasse Tyson. Instead, it's "different competing ideas" and figuring out ways to reach "an intelligent compromise."
But not everyone was ready to let deGrasse Tyson off easily with that explanation.
"You see it as democracy but you’re part of the museum," yelled one resident sitting in the audience.
Another attendee, Ben Moore, told deGrasse Tyson he had to set him straight on the meaning of democracy — it's when nine people in a boat decide to eat the tenth, he said. The joke elicited muffled laughter and a weary smile from deGrasse Tyson.
Though there was plenty of praise heaped on the museum, a faction of those who attended the meeting were not happy that though the museum has shrunk the amount of parkland it's using to a quarter of an acre, a reduction from what it had previously projected, that still wasn't enough.
Some residents are vowing to fight any use of parkland by the museum.
But deGrasse Tyson reminded the crowd that the Gilder Center is not just another building, it's meant to be a center of innovation.
And innovation is "when you’ve seen what everyone else has seen before but think the way no one else has thought before. You land in a new place.
"It’s innovation that has been thin in our culture in recent decades," he said.
► Did you miss the meeting? Read through our live tweets from the event.
