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A crowd of upper-crust New Yorkers sipped wine and soft drinks at Manhattan's Chelsea Piers on a comfortable autumn night last October, as lights from a row of New Jersey high-rises illuminated the ripples in the Hudson River.
Gathered to socialize and raise funds for the New York Hall of Science, the assembled glitterati included corporate executives, politicians and such media titans as Morley Safer of CBS News and his boss, Sony Corp. chairman Howard Stringer.
The crowd, in tuxedos and cocktail dresses, also wore glowing neon plastic rings on their heads.
They also played with key chains that blinked in randomly alternating patterns of blue, red, yellow and green, grooved to the psychedelic thrills of light refracted through small, rainbow- accented peephole discs, and watched a red dot dance on a screen as a professorial, bearded man explained why laser light resists refraction. (Unlike regular light, laser light consists of only one color.)
Amid the din of uninhibited silliness, Alan Friedman, the man with the beard, stood at the podium with the satisfied, slightly mischievous look of a practical joker whose stunt has had the desired effect.
Hall's resident visionary
When he isn't dreaming up ways to make grown-ups behave like preschoolers, Friedman is the Hall of Science's director, chief fund- raiser, staff recruiter and resident visionary. He works out of a small, windowless office in the basement, where his collection of books and papers occasionally is damaged by leaking rainwater. A scale model of the 19th-century Scottish clipper ship Cutty Sark, which Friedman made as a teenager growing up in Brooklyn, sits on the floor, awaiting its eventual relocation to the director's new office.
That office will be in Science City, the $68-million, 55,000- square-foot addition under construction at the hall's home in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. When it's completed later this year, the new wing will double the hall's floor space and, at least in theory, double attendance from the current 275,000 per year. It also will enable the museum to house more permanent exhibits, including shows on extraterrestrial life and the science of sports.
The addition is something of a crowning achievement for a facility that barely existed when Friedman took the job 20 years ago.
The hall's main building,...