On Friday, July 14, the StrongMuseum
will reopen its doors after a seven-week hiatus. Much has changed since late
May, including the name: the institution is now officially known as Strong —
National Museum of Play to better describe its new focus on the study of play
and its role in human development.
Your kids won’t notice that.
They’ll be far too busy freaking out over what’s inside. The
old favorites are still there, from “Sesame
Street” to the miniature Wegmans
store to the branch of the Monroe County Public Library. But the $37 million
expansion project has ballooned the museum to 282,000 square feet — nearly
double its previous size — and the space is packed full of creative, hands-on
activities that will keep kids busy for hours, if not days, to come.
Here are some highlights, based on our recent sneak peek of
the in-construction exhibits.
Driving down Chestnut Street,
you can’t help but see the most noticeable element of the Strong expansion: a
huge portal known as “The Caterpillar.” Once you step inside, you understand
the name. This is a three-story, 200-foot-long curved tube that serves as an
atrium connecting the established museum to the expansion. If you climb to the
top you’ll find the relocated National Toy Hall of Fame, which can now spread
out instead of being shoehorned in next to the Time Lab in the upper level of
the museum.
At the foot of The Caterpillar, however, is something
entirely new: Reading Adventureland. The
12,000-square-foot exhibit takes visitors through five exceedingly hands-on
“literary landscapes” that bring to life children’s storybook staples.
Enter through the archway and step on to the Yellow Brick Road.
The first exit to your right is MysteryMansion, a spooky house
that tests the skills of aspiring Hardy Boys or Nancy Drews.
Are those eyes in the painting on the wall moving? Where are those strange, ghoulish moans coming from? Is something flashing
in the fireplace?
Children will have to follow the clues and crack the case…
or find the secret passageway, and make a little trouble themselves. (For every
Sherlock Holmes, there’s got to be a Dr. Moriarty.)
Next door to MysteryMansion is the perplexing
Upside-Down Nonsense House. Painted in bright, trippy
colors in random patterns, the nonconformist house would make Dr. Seuss proud.
Rhymes and limericks are the language spoken here, and if you need help
expanding your vocabulary, give the Tongue Twister Machine a spin. Also check
out the kitchen for a joke-telling chicken, the hall for mirrors that change
your shape, and other screwball ideas.
Off the coast of the Nonsense House, the dragon-fronted S.S.
Courageous has crashed on AdventureIsland. Would-be
swashbucklers have a chance to steer a pirate ship through some choppy waters,
explore a hidden cove for buried treasure, charge over a suspension bridge, or
play with makeshift tools and toys on a deserted island.
Harry Potter fans
will want to wander through the Wizard Workshop. Be on the lookout for magic
hats, cauldrons, and mystical creatures like unicorns and dragons. Next door is
Fairy Tale Forest, with a gingerbread house and interactive displays that show
how fairy tales have evolved over the years, from terrifying cautionary tales
to sweet bedtime stories. The meek can take a peek inside the Jack ‘n’ Jill’s
well or sit in Cinderella’s pumpkin coach, while the brave can climb Jack’s
beanstalk and encounter a massive animatronic giant
or play a laser-stringed singing harp.
The next destination is the DancingWingsButterflyGarden.
The natural offshoot of The Caterpillar, the garden is housed in an attached,
butterfly-shaped building filled with tropical plants, a waterfall, and a
minimum of 800 tropical and native butterflies that flap through the air, and
even alight on visitors. The butterflies are shipped in while still in
chrysalis, and then they emerge on-premises. In the waiting room, educational
exhibits will explain the butterfly’s life cycle.
The final major component of the expansion is Field of Play,
housed in an adjoining building that looks as if it’s constructed out of a pile
of building blocks. Inside, kids will find a rock wall for climbing, an
“undersea jellyfish garden” for exploring, a crooked house for balancing in, a
walk-through kaleidoscope for making patterns, and mock race cars for driving.
The activities demonstrate how important play time is to learning how to
function as a human being.
The new exhibits are only the most visual part of the Strong expansion. Strong is also starting its
own preschool this fall (as of late last week, only four of the 56 slots remain
open). And there are plans to launch a scholarly magazine called the American Journal of Play next year. It’s
all part of CEO G. Rollie Adams’ vision for the
museum, which first opened in 1982 to display the prodigious collections of
Margaret Woodbury Strong. Margaret Strong’s eclectic collections included dolls
and dollhouses, stamps, buttons, and furniture, and when the museum first opened
it focused on Victorian styles and culture. Adams
came aboard in September 1987, and 10 years later he shifted Strong’s focus
specifically to children. With its new expansion, Strong will be the
second-largest children’s museum in the country, right behind the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.
The expansion, and the rebranding
as the National Museum of Play, is “an outgrowth of the response to our
previous expansion [in 1997] and a consequence of market research that
indicated a demand for expanded facilities and programs,” Adams
says. He cites attendance figures that swelled from 142,500 in 1995 to 345,000
in 2005, and says that the goal for the current expansion is to net 650,000
visitors after a full year.
Ed Hall, CEO of the Greater Rochester Visitor’s Association,
thinks those numbers are totally doable. “If anything, I think they may be a
little on the conservative side,” he says. “There’s an excitement, a
repositioning of the museum as a national institution.” Hall is specifically
looking to the ButterflyGarden as a big draw; he previously worked Houston, which had two
nearby butterfly gardens that did a huge business across a variety of
demographics.
More than 600,000 visitors sounds
like a tall order. After all, MonroeCounty has a population
of just more than 733,000, according to 2005 Census Bureau estimates. Adams says that the museum is doing some national
marketing, specifically courting travel writers and regularly scoring buzz for
the annual Toy Hall of Fame inductions each fall. But most of the focus will
remain in the upstate New York area, with the
hopes of pulling visitors from Syracuse, Buffalo, and the Southern
Tier, and a subsequent push for billboards, TV, and radio commercials is
planned for those areas this summer.
In the meantime, Rochester
children can get the first crack at what’s behind that big Caterpillar eye at
the revamped Strong — National Museum of Play July 14-16 with the grand
reopening weekend, during which the museum will be open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
daily. As of July 17, the museum’s summer hours will be Mondays through
Thursdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fridays 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturdays 10 a.m.-6 p.m.;
and Sundays noon-6 p.m. Admission will cost $9 for adults, $8 for
students/seniors, $7 children 6-12, and free for kids 2 and younger; the
Butterfly Garden requires an additional $3 ticket. Two-day passes are also
available for $11-$14.50. For more information check out
www.strongmuseum.org or call 263-2700.
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2006.
