The New York Museum of Natural History, located in Central Manhattan at West 72nd Street, is a major setting for several Preston-Child books including Relic, Reliquary, and The Book of the Dead. The museum is huge, comprising one million square feet of space including five miles of forced-air ducts and a multi-level subbasement containing a network of unmapped tunnels, some of which were built to drain the artesian swamp that lies under the oldest museum buildings.