3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

114 3 The New York Years (1931–1953)
Fig.3.6. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City, a red brick structure in
the Victorian Gothic style built from 1874 to 1877. The Theodore Roosevelt memorial (the
Rotunda) and the Whitney Wing (to the right) were added during the 1930s. Ernst Mayr’s
office from 1935 onward was located in the right hand (northeastern) corner of the Whitney
Wing on the 4th floor (large windows). Aerial view over the Museum westward with the
Hudson River in the background. Photograph taken in 1957 (AMNH Library photographic
collection, negative no. 125037)
Mayr would have had several opportunities to go out again on expeditions,
but F.M. Chapman, Chairman of the department, firmly pointed out to him, that
he was paid from the Whitney Fund to work on the Whitney Collections. To
compensate for these restrictions, Mayr in his free time did quite a bit of birdwatching
and fieldwork around New York, especially during the late 1930s and in
1940. In 1932, he had contacted the group of geneticists at Columbia University
(New York) in conjunction with his studies of avian plumages. These contacts
and those with Th. Dobzhansky in California guided him to general systematic
and evolutionary problems on which he began to lecture in late 1939 (“Speciation
phenomena in birds”) followed by the Jesup Lectures on evolution at Columbia
University in 1941, the foundation of his major work: Systematics and the OriginofSpeciesfromtheViewpointofaZoologist(1942e).
He became very active
as a member and secretary of the Society for the Study of Evolution (1946), first
editor of its journal Evolution (1947–1949) and president (1950). Now an authority
on evolutionary biology he was invited by various universities as a lecturer
or visiting professor (e.g., Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, 1947; University of
Minnesota, 1949; Columbia University, New York 1950–1953; University of Wash-