81st Street-Natural History Museum

81st Street has, like all the other stops on Central Park West, two side platforms stacked on top of each other: Uptown above Downtown, with the entrances on the west side of the street. The station has also an exit that leads directly into the American Museum of Natural History, so people don't have to go outside to get inside.

The wall
The wall layout is like all IND station layouts. Some people don't know this, but the tiles saying 'Museum' are written in mosaics, and not tiles.

Arts for Transit
Even though this is a local station (The next express stations are 59th street and 125th street), this station has a huge amount of art created by the MTA Arts for Transit team entitles For Want of a Nail. The upper level consists of glass mosaics of different animals, including extinct animals (colored grey) and endangered species (marked with a question mark). The lower level has reliefs of fossils of various prehistoric animals (with information of the animal shown on one of the nearby tiles). There's also reliefs, painted tiles, among others in the three stairways. One before the big bang, one inside the earth, an one under the sea. There's also some cut granite on the floor, mostly near the platform edge.