Museums

Visiting: the World’s Biggest Children’s Museum

Courtesy The Children’s Museum

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis dates back to 1925 and now, with more than 130,00 artifacts and more than 4,00 programs, is the world’s largest children’s museum.

Highlights include the Dinsophere, the historic carousel, a 55-ton steam engine, cultural exhibits, a 43-foot tall tower of Chihuly glass, an international space station exhibit, and a plethora of sports-themed, interactive outdoor exhibits.

If you visit, be sure to set a good part of your day, because it’s the kind of attraction that offers something surprising and engaging at every turn for both kids and adults.

Behind The Scenes At The Children’s Museum

Like most museums, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis can only display a very small part of its collection. And with such a large collection, that means that a lot of really great stuff is kept in storage.

Lucky for us, Chris Carron, the museum’s Director of Collections, offers occasional behind-the-scenes tours of the treasures.

Here are just a few of our favorites.

The Children’s Museum has the world’s largest collection of Mr. Potato Head memorabilia

Inside this matchbox is a diorama of a village populated with dress fleas. It is one of the smallest objects in the collection.

This Steiff bear was once used as a store display. It’s big, but the museum’s dinosaurs are far bigger.

February is Museum Month in Seattle & San Diego

If you love visiting museums, you probably love visiting museums for free.

(Who wouldn’t?)

And during February visitors to both Seattle and San Diego can take advantage of special Museum Month programs that offer great savings on museum visits.

Seattle Museum Month

February is Seattle Museum Month. And during this promotion, any guest who stays just one night at one of the participating downtown hotels receives a pass that offers half-price admission at more than 30 museums and attractions around the region.

The pass is good for up to 4 guests for the entire month.

In Seattle, the list of participating museums includes the Burke Museum, Chihuly Garden and Glass, the Museum of Pop Culture, the Seattle Aquarium, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Flight, the Woodland Park Zoo, and many more. The participating hotels range from budget to swanky.

February is off-season in the Emerald City and there are already great hotel deals pretty much everywhere. Add in a pass that gets you half-off many of the museums and attractions in Seattle and other cities in the region and it’s just a super great deal.

That goes for locals seeking a ‘staycation’ or anyone considering a visit.

San Diego Museum Month

San Diego Natural History Museum – Fossil Mysteries

 San Diego Museum Month is back this February for its 34th year.

This year the popular program has more than 60 museums historic sites, gardens, aquariums, and other cultural destinations and attractions throughout San Diego County offering half-priced admissions all month.

In San Diego, the list of participating museums includes the Comic-Con Museum, the San Diego Natural History Museum, the San Diego Air & Space Museum, the Maritime Museum of San Diego, and dozens more.

The free San Diego Museum Month pass can be downloaded here.

Public libraries in San Diego County also have passes to distribute.

Each Museum Month pass can be used for up to four half-priced admissions at any of the participating museums until February 28, 2023.

Have fun!


 

Museum Monday: Lightner Museum Turns 75

If we’re not in an airport, you’ll find the Stuck at the Airport team in a museum.

And if it’s a museum with some unusual collections, all the better.

The Lightner Museum in St. Augustine, Florida fits the bill.

And how.

First built as the Hotel Alcazar in 1888, the building opened as the Lightner Museum of Hobbies in January 1948.

The museum was created by Otto Lightner, a great advocate of collecting and the publisher of Hobbies magazine.

Lightner promoted every kind of hobby, from collecting matchbooks and cigar labels to whittling wood. But he was also a great collector himself and had the means to amass a substantial personal collection of fine and decorative art, natural history specimens, Americana, and just plain stuff. 

Cigar Lables

Lightner first opened a museum of hobbies in Chicago in 1934. And in addition to his eclectic and eccentric collections, he encour­aged the readers of Hobbies magazine to send him their collec­tions. 

They did.

Following a stay in St. Augustine’s in 1946, Lightner purchased the Hotel Alcazar to serve as the permanent home for his collections.

The collections include lamps by Louis Comfort Tiffany, shells, geological specimens, a vast number of salt & pepper shakers, Victurian mechanical insturments, and hundreds of thousands of buttons.

We know there also some shrunken heads in the collection.

And in celebration of the museum’s 75th diamond anniversary in 2023, the museum is hosting a special exhibition titled, 75 for 75.

On display is a selection of artwork and objects from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibit opens on February 2nd and we’re making plans to visit soon.

From the Lightner Museum Collection

Ride On!

We love anything transportation. So the Lightner Museum’s new exhibit “Ride On!: Historic Bicycles from the Keith Pariani Collection,” is also of great interest.

Here are some of the exhibit notes on the early popularity of the bicycles and the Hotel Alacazar’s ‘bicycle academy:’

In the 1890s the bicycle took over the hearts and minds of Americans. By the early twentieth century, almost 300 bicycle manufacturing firms were established in the US. Swept up in the craze for cycling, the Lightner Museum’s historic building, the Hotel Alcazar, offered its own bicycle academy, allowing its guests to tour Gilded Age St. Augustine on two wheels. 

First developed in Europe in the early nineteenth century, the bicycle took decades of design and engineering to make it safe and convenient for the average rider.  The first popular models of the bicycle were high-wheeled and dangerous for unskilled riders because of the frequency of falls. However, with the invention of the “Safety” bicycle, the vehicle became a safer and more popular mode of transportation. The women’s safety bicycle, allowing for women’s dress, helped boost the bicycle’s popularity even more. By the 1890s, the safety bicycle was widely used in the U.S. by everyone, regardless of age or gender, for both transportation and recreation.

The “Ride On!” exhibit runs February 2 through September 30, 2023.

Bicycle Academy

Free admission on Museum Day and other days

Courtesy MoPOP

[This is a story we wrote for NBC News]

As inflation leads households to tighten their entertainment and travel budgets, many are forgoing trips to museums and cultural institutions, where tickets can often top $25 per person.

This coming Saturday, Sept. 17, might bring some temporary relief.

For the 18th annual Museum Day, a nationwide program spearheaded by Smithsonian magazine, nearly 1,000 museums, science centers, zoos, cultural attractions and historic sites will waive admission fees; visitors just have to download a free ticket.

The event comes at a precarious time for an industry that is trying to regain its financial footing from the pandemic’s disruptions. Attendance was down by nearly 40% last year at many of the nation’s museums, according to the American Alliance of Museums, and curators are trying to entice visitors who may opt to spend their limited leisure dollars elsewhere.

Like many other museums around the country, Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture hasn’t seen attendance recover to pre-Covid levels. The museum, where current exhibitions run from Afrofuturist costume design to hometown rock band Pearl Jam, offers entry starting around $25 but will waive admission fees on Saturday for Museum Day ticket holders.

“After a strong spring where we exceeded attendance expectations, the summer has slowed down a bit,” said MoPOP spokesman Michael Cole-Schwartz. “We largely attribute that to high gas prices dissuading regional visitors we might have otherwise expected.”

Drew Ramsey, a security engineer from Phoenix, seeks museum discounts “sometimes obsessively” while traveling with his family. “I will comb a place’s website, search social media and message boards, and check deal sites like Groupon to ensure I’m getting the best admission prices available,” he said.

He’s discovered that some marquee venues rarely offer discounts, but that hasn’t always deterred him: “Why make the effort and pay to visit somewhere and then skip the prime attractions?”

If Covid restrictions and mandated closures weighed on Museum Day last year, this year’s event coincides with inflation that is just starting to cool off from 40-year highs — which could raise the appeal of waived entry fees. Admission prices for museums, movies, concerts, theme parks and other cultural activities were 6.2% higher last month than they were in August last year, federal data show.

Museum Day offers entry fee relief

Courtesy San Fransico Museum of Craft and Design

To offer a break from those cost pressures, sites participating in Museum Day are rolling out bonus programming, new exhibitions and other ways to both lure in visitors and delight them enough to return after the admission holiday ends.

Honolulu’s Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum (adult admission: $25.99) will offer family-friendly activities including open cockpits, scavenger hunts and a Rosie the Riveter costume contest. The American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog in New York City (adult admission: $15) debuts its 40th-anniversary exhibition on Wednesday, just in time for Museum Day. And at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design (adult admission: $10), visitors will be able to join craft activities or leave with a free kit of art supplies.

This is the fifth year MCD is participating in Museum Day. It expects hundreds of visitors with free passes to show up and “try something new or take a chance on something they might not have otherwise,” said museum spokeswoman Sarah Beth Rosales.

Museums earn around 40% of their revenue from admissions, facility rentals and gift shop sales, according to the American Alliance of Museums. “They are certainly grappling with the impacts of rising inflation and the massive financial impact the pandemic had on their operations over the last few years,” said AAM president and CEO Laura Lott.

Sixty-one percent of museums AAM surveyed last winter reported an average 38% decrease in net operating performance, and 27% said their performance sank even further in 2021, by an average of 33%. Lott said she expects ongoing financial difficulties to persist into next year.

How are museums coping?

Many museums have shaved staff and programming. Nearly three-quarters of museums in AAM’s survey said they’d managed to retain or restore all their workers, with often vital support from government relief funds.

But more than half the museums with job openings reported difficulty filling roles. Employment in the nation’s museum sector stood at around 92,400 in July, according to preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 79,000 a year earlier but well below the 103,600 in July 2019.

Some museums have raised admission fees to help shore up their finances. In July, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art hiked general admission to $30, a $5 increase, for visitors who aren’t state residents or regional students, groups that can still pay what they wish.

study last year by a discount-tracking website, deal A, found more than a dozen major U.S. museums have raised ticket prices by between 20% and more than 60% in the past few years.

Many other museums have kept prices steady while testing out fresh ways to serve the public. Confronted with Covid-19, institutions across the country launched initiatives — many of them free — to meet community needs, and AAM found that many of those have continued, including online learning programs, food banks and wellness offerings.

During the pandemic, the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia opened the previously off-limits second floor of its landmarked building, including the historical medical library, to daily visitors and hosted public and private events in its medicinal plant garden.

In Hutchinson, Kansas, the Cosmosphere, which boasts the world’s largest combined collection of U.S. and Soviet-era space artifacts, remodeled four gallery areas during the pandemic and added a new interactive STEM space that’s free with admission.

The museum hasn’t raised ticket prices and attendance has bounced back quickly, spokeswoman Mimi Meredith said, thanks in part to the “Sunflower Summer” program that began last year and allowed Kansans to visit museums, zoos, historic landmarks and other venues for free this summer as well.

The Cosmosphere has also broadened its regular offerings to include programs tied to special days, such as mathematics celebrations to mark Pi Day on March 14. A few weeks ago, the site set up chairs and big-screen TVs in its lobby for free viewings of the Artemis 1 launch, although NASA wound up postponing two attempts over mechanical issues.

“As families make choices about how to spend dollars that have been stretched farther and farther over the years, we’re trying to be more of a resource for families to experience things together,” Meredith said.

More ways to get free or discounted museum admissions

If you miss Museum Day this weekend, don’t worry. Many museums have regular days or hours when admission is free, discounted or “pay what you wish.” And a membership card from a museum in the North American Reciprocal Museum Association will get you free admission to more than 1,000 member museums in the U.S., Canada, Bermuda, El Salvador and Mexico.

In some American cities, a group of museums may offer free admission on the first Thursday or Friday of a given month or, like Seattle and San Diego, offer two-for-one deals during the winter when few tourists are in town. Some sites, like Chicago’s Field Museum, offer state residents free entry on select days. And in Washington, D.C., admission is always free at Smithsonian Institution venues, including the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Zoo.

The Blue Star Museums program provides free admission to active, retired and veteran military personnel and their families during the summer. The Museums for All program offers free or reduced admission year-round to visitors with public assistance (EBT) ID cards. And many public libraries have museum passes that can be checked out free to anyone with a current library card.

“We hope that free admission days will entice community members, new residents and travelers to visit museums they never have experienced before and expand their appreciation for the incredible gems that may have always been in their backyards,” said AAM’s Laura Lott — and, of course, maybe come back again as paying guests

How to get tickets to Smithsonian’ Renovated Air & Space Museum

1909 Wright Flyer – Courtesy Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Wahington, D.C. has been undergoing a seven-year renovation that includes the redesign of all 23 exhibitions and presentation spaces.

The big reveal is around the corner. Approximately half of the building will reopen on Friday, October 14 and will include eight new and renovated exhibitions, the planetarium, the museum store, and Mars Cafe.

And, while admission to the museum is free, you’re going to need a timed entry pass ticket.

Here’s how to get a ticket:

Free passes will be available online starting Wednesday, Sept. 14.

Each person will be able to reserve up to six passes per day for a specific entry time.

To enter the museums, visitors will need to show their digital timed-entry pass on their mobile device or a printed copy of their time-entry pass.

Visitors will be able to enter the Museum for up to one hour after the time on their entry pass. If you show up more than an hour after the time on your entry pass you’ll only be able to enter the museum if walk-up passes are available.

The link to reserve tickets will go live on September 14 at noon ET and can be accessed from the museum’s website

The museum will release individual passes for six-week periods at noon ET on the following dates: 

Release DatePasses Available
Sept. 14, 2022Oct. 14 – Nov. 30, 2022
Oct. 28, 2022Dec. 1, 2022 – Jan. 14, 2023
Dec. 16, 2022Jan. 15 – Feb. 28, 2023
Jan. 27, 2023March 1 – April 14, 2023

In addition to these advance ticket releases, a limited number of same-day passes will be released each day at 8:30 a.m. ET beginning Oct. 14. 

See you there!

Courtesy Smithsonian Institution