It took four years and $32 million.
It took some of the most prominent minds in the field.
It took the melding of educators and academics with Disney fantasists.
It took turning a vacant urban hulk into a whimsical dream factory.
All this, and the question remains: Will this thing work?
When Port Discovery opens Dec. 29 in Baltimore, it will be the third-largest children's museum in the country, next to ones in Indianapolis and Boston. The creators call it a revolutionary prototype for the next generation of children's museums -- a magical place where education merges with fun.
It's a big, expensive promise, yet there is no precise formula for guaranteeing Port Discovery's success. In the words of Ann Lewin, former director of the Capital Children's Museum in Washington, creating a children's museum remains "more accident than art."
Though children's museums have been around for a century -- Port Discovery coincidentally opens on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the nation's first, in Brooklyn -- no one knows exactly how or why a child learns in a museum.
Beyond educated guesswork, isolating the essence of a great children's museum is nearly impossible, says Michael Oppenheimer, a respected museum exhibit designer. "It's so mysterious and complicated, and we can't get at it very directly."
Even so, propelled by the forces of education reform and urban revitalization, children's museums have proliferated in the United States, from a handful in the 1970s to nearly 300 today. About 22 million people will visit them this year, lured by invitations to touch, explore and learn.
Whether or not Port Discovery succeeds, its long evolution from modest home-grown resource to Inner Harbor centerpiece reflects the inexact science of creating children's museums.
As Port Discovery director Kathy Dwyer Southern says: "The real learning is going to happen when we open the door."
Jumping off
Founded in 1977 as the Baltimore Children's Museum at the Cloisters, in a Falls Road mansion willed to Baltimore, Port Discovery's precursor was aimed at preschoolers. It enjoyed a steady audience for years, but by 1993 faced a crisis: It needed to broaden its appeal to stay solvent, and it needed to become accessible to disabled patrons to avoid a lawsuit. The cost of renovating while adhering to the mansion's historic designation precluded both.
Ties to the city were severed, and a private board was appointed. After uneasy debate, the board voted to move
downtown, where a children's museum could attract a wider audience and be part of revitalization efforts.
The board merged with another nonprofit group, Maryland Children's Museum Inc., to explore the possibilities for a museum at the Inner Harbor. The mansion was closed in 1994, and preliminary plans for "Port Discovery" were hatched.
By all accounts, the museum project truly took off when Douglas L. Becker, co-CEO of Sylvan Learning Systems, the international tutoring company based in Baltimore, became chairman that year. "It was really the beginning of momentum for this museum," says Beatrice E. Taylor, former Cloisters director and now Port Discovery's director of programs and education.
Before taking the assignment, Becker trained his businessman's eye on kids' museums around the country to see if they were economically viable. He discovered that they could draw visitors hungry for wholesome family activities and that they could generate a higher percentage of income through gate receipts and party rentals than other types of museums.
A children's museum could serve a "very wonderful Robin Hood role" for the city, he figured.
When Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke also threw his support behind an Inner Harbor location, Becker officially embraced the project. Generous pledges began to come in soon afterward.
Becker's inquiries led him to enlist Michael Spock, a pioneering children's museum expert and son of famed pediatrician Benjamin Spock, and Walt Disney Imagineering, Disney's design and development arm, established in 1952 to create Disneyland.
With this powerful entourage, the project outgrew its intended new site, the Brokerage office building two blocks north of the Inner Harbor. In 1995, the city acquired the neighboring 80,000-square-foot Fish Market building at 35 Market Place and leased it to the museum.
As board members dug for dollars, the Port Discovery team launched a quest for an identity.
The right to dream
Finding a common vision wasn't easy. Team members warily eyed one another across a cultural divide. How could they mesh the sensibilities of those who brought you the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and Tomorrowland with those who want children to become self-motivated, lifelong learners?
Spock, at first skeptical of the Disney alliance, says: "They were afraid it wouldn't be any fun, ... worried we would make them be academic, and would suck the thing dry of its life. We were worried it would turn out to be fluff."
Even the two sides' vocabularies had to be translated for each other. Spock and Taylor, the museum's director of programs, insisted that problem-solving, goal-setting and risk-taking be incorporated into the exhibits for "visitors."
Doris Hardoon Woodward, senior show producer at Walt Disney Imagineering, insisted on packaging the museum into an enthralling "storytelling device" for "guests."
Gradually, the team came to see entertainment and education as compatible elements. "We embrace entertainment as a way in," Southern says now. "One leads to another. ... Also, we know that people learn better when they're engaged, inspired, amused. They don't learn as well when they're intimidated, bored and frightened."
It was at a tortuous meeting in Baltimore in early 1996 that the museum's identity crystallized. Spock, Taylor, Woodward and others sat wearily around a conference table past midnight, poring over countless interviews with educators, mental health professionals and kids. Many of them had indicated that in recent decades children were losing hope in the future. Poor kids had few opportunities to explore their interests. Middle-class kids, programmed from sunup to sundown, had little time to unloose their imaginations.
With sudden clarity, the team realized: Everyone has a right to dreams and aspirations.
The revelation was "simple and core," Southern says, cutting across all developmental abilities, cultures and ages. From there, "The door really opened," Southern says. "We held ourselves to that concept in the design of everything within the museum."
Then came the next challenge: translating theme and theory into living, breathing attractions that would engage children's minds and bodies.
What kids like
On a recent outing to the Chicago Children's Museum, 4-year-old Cody Davis stopped at the acclaimed new Dr. Seuss exhibit, an interactive maze where kids can jump on a "seven-hump Wump of Gump" and pretend to swim in the "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" pond.
He wasn't impressed.
Next, Cody scaled the three-story climbing tower, a jungle-gym fashioned like the schooners that ply Lake Michigan, outside the museum's door.
Ho-hum.
Then came the "Under Construction" exhibit. Cody stayed for two hours.
His aunt, Jill Hartzman, had never seen the preschooler so engrossed. Clutching screws and washers, Cody built a house from peg boards, complete with kitchen and bedroom. Skipping lunch, he labored in that creative trance known among children's museum experts as the "flow experience."
Cody's example illustrates the challenges facing museum builders: How can an institution appeal to children's immeasurable range of preference and imagination? There are no concrete recipes for creating a sure-fire exhibit -- even for one child -- and children often use exhibits in ways never intended by designers.
What is known about children's museums, in many respects, is thanks to Michael Spock, who laid the groundwork when he became director at the Children's Museum of Boston in the early '60s. Struggling to define the museum's role, he achieved a breakthrough "when we finally understood that what makes a children's museum different is that it is for somebody rather than about something."
Spock's revelation led to a museum where children learned by tinkering, listening and exploring in interactive environments. It was a free-flowing environment where designers' mistakes were embraced as learning opportunities, and success was measured an exhibit's broken parts, frayed edges and wear and tear.
With its fearless approach to the chaotic spectacle of kids at play (as well as community outreach and sensitive treatment of cultural and racial diversity), Spock's museum blazed a trail for children's museums to follow.
Certain beliefs have emerged since then:
* Exhibits should be open-ended, with multiple entry points that allow kids to "create their own experience," and without rigid educational steps or pre-determined outcomes.
* Exhibits that allow kids to learn by doing -- for example, carding wool or role-playing in vintage clothing -- give them a tactile grasp of history and culture.
* Exhibits that most closely resemble the impromptu play environment of a back yard often work best.
Another important rule of thumb: Don't forget the coat-holders who accompany kids.
"On some level, children's museums are really for parents," says Joe Ruggiero, an exhibit designer at the Flandrau Science Center in Tucson, Ariz. "Kids are very open to the world, willing to explore anything, a construction site, a mud puddle, pond or city street. But as parents don't always have time to take them through the world, a children's museum gives them a shortcut ... [and] really works best when a kid can interact with its parents."
But such guidelines don't make it easy to discern what lessons even a successful exhibit can teach. Take the Waterworks section of the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, created by Michael Oppenheimer, who cut his teeth at the Exploratorium, the maverick San Francisco science museum founded by his physicist father Frank Oppenheimer in 1969.
A huge surface covered with sand, pipes, pumps and reservoirs, Waterworks replicates a city water system. Kids get plenty wet directing water flow and playing with dams and floods.
Children "spend hours playing on this thing," Oppenheimer says, but "I can't tell you what learning [goes] on."
Spock and other experts are involved in a five-year study to measure what children take from exhibits like Waterworks. While it's early for specific conclusions, it is clear that children's museums play a key role as "educational laboratories," says the project's director, Nina Freedlander Gibans, a Case Western Reserve University faculty member. They are places to observe "how kids do learn."
Major features
When it came time to create Port Discovery's exhibits, the "dream" team stuck with elements common to traditional children's museums, such as the ubiquitous climbing tower and hands-on workshop. But the team also made radical departures by incorporating scripted, Disney-formulated exhibits.
While these exhibits offer some choices, they are not completely open-ended. They take a step toward an amusement-park model and away from hands-on experience with materials like water and static electricity.
Adventure Expeditions, for example, simulates the Nile River with shimmery lights, artistic renderings and sound effects. It's a degree more artificial than the Waterworks exhibition, which is a simulation of San Jose's Guadalupe River but involves play with real water.
Disney Imagineering says its high-energy exhibits create an irreverent museum with "attitude" that will appeal to today's 6- to 12-year-olds, many of whom are raised on the likes of Beavis and Butt-head and the Simpsons. Kids will relate to the off-kilter exhibits, rude noises and cheeky humor, Disney says.
The museum's major features reflect the balancing act that forms "edu-tainment":
* Adventure Expeditions: A time-trekking odyssey to ancient Egypt. Visitors step gingerly across the Nile, navigate a maze and decipher hieroglyphics to discover the identity of a buried pharaoh. The exhibit is designed to teach persistence, problem-solving and creative thinking.
* Miss Perception's Mystery House: Children play games and follow clues to solve the disappearance of the "oddball family" that lives in this off-kilter abode. The exhibit encourages visitors to learn that the world is "full of illusions, but you can work through them to accomplish your goals."
* KidWorks: A three-story climbing tower with puzzle doors, crawling tubes and wobbly bridges designed to look like it was built by kids. Young daredevils will test their persistence, bravery and cooperative play skills.
* R&D; Dream Lab: Allows children to use real power tools to create wind-driven machines and other dreamlike inventions.
* The Pratt Exploration Center: A branch of the Baltimore library system. Stocked with new books about music, sports and other interests, it will be open to the public.
* Maryland Public Television: A television studio exhibit. Children can participate in a mock game show that stresses financial literacy. The studio's hands-on production component opens next year.
The Dream Squad, a resident cast of six life-size shadow puppets, ties all the attractions together under the "daring to dream" theme. Operated by costumed staff members, each character symbolizes a strategy in realizing a dream: Howie Lovitt represents "passion," Wanda Whye "exploration," Ivan Idea imagination" and so on.
A work in progress
So will it all work? Will children really learn how to spin dreams into reality at Port Discovery?
An alarm sounds for exhibit designer Ruggiero when he hears that parts of Port Discovery bend more toward theatrical re-creation than hands-on experience. "I don't really like simulations," he says. "If you're playing with the real phenomena, even if you don't understand it, at least you see the real thing."
Oppenheimer questions Port Discovery's decision to feature exhibits not directly connected to Baltimore; the museum's atrium facade tips its hat to the city's rowhouse tradition, but most everything else is Disney fantasy.
"I can't tell you how important that is," Oppenheimer says. "One of the reasons is that the museum becomes a real mirror of the community. ... What you decide to build is influenced by where you are, how you build it is influenced by where you are. ... What happens is influenced by where you are."
Oppenheimer is also leery of creating exhibits that plot a course - or even multiple courses - from start to finish. "I've never seen a scripted exhibit work," he says. "When you say you have to [do it like this], that's the clue ... [visitors] are not going to take any kind of ownership ... it's antithetical to curiosity."
Woodward, speaking for the Disney Imagineers, says it is not for her to say whether or not children will learn to dream here. "Ultimately, our expertise is in manifesting and providing a vehicle for whatever [Port Discovery's] mission is. That question is really more for them."
Spock is not worried. The dream motif might not lock into place right away, he says, and midcourse corrections may be needed - "we're not opening a finished product." But no matter, Port Discovery's inherent value is guaranteed by the quality of its designers, "very smart people making very intelligent guesses."
The combined expertise of Disney and museum professionals has created a singular institutional hybrid, Beatrice Taylor says. It's not just a kid's museum. It's not just a high-tech amusement park. It's "something that's new and better because these two came together."
DISCOVERY CREW
Michael Spock: Senior adviser on exhibits and programs.
Former director of the Boston Children's Museum in the early '60s, Spock, 65, is currently a fellow at the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago. Before that, he was vice president for public programs at the Field Museum in Chicago, where he was responsible for diversifying theaudience and rebuilding the museum's public programs. He has been with Port Discovery for four years. He is the son of the late Dr. Benjamin Spock.
L Kathy Dwyer Southern: President and chief executive officer.
Southern, 52, is responsible for completing a comprehensive capital and endowment campaign, development of a # professional staff of 65 (plus 80 volunteers), supervision of restoration and exhibit development. Before the Port Discovery position, Southern was executive director of Montpelier, a Virginia tourist attraction and the home of President James Madison. Southern has been with Port Discovery for two years.
Douglas L. Becker: Chairman of the board.
Becker, 32, is president and co-chief executive officer of Sylvan Learning Systems, whose headquarters are in Baltimore. He is also founder of and principal in Sterling Capital, a diversified holding company. In 1995, he was named Maryland's Master Entrepreneur of the Year. He has been with Port Discovery for four years.
Beatrice E. Taylor: Director of programs and education.
Taylor, 54, will plan exhibits and programs for the museum. She is former director of the Children's Museum at the Cloisters. She worked as an assistant art professor at California State University, Los Angeles from 1990-1991, and as a consultant at the Smithsonian Institution office of elementary and secondary education. She began at Port Discovery four years ago.
Doris Hardoon Woodward: Senior show producer for Walt Disney Imagineering.
NTC Woodward, 46, directed her company's role in the design of Port Discovery. She served the same role in the creative development of Westcot Center, a proposed Disney theme park in California. Woodward has a long Disney resume. Trained as a graphic artist, she helped design Epcot Center in Florida and the New Fantasyland at Disneyland in California. She was chief designer for the Autry Museum of the Western Heritage, which opened in 1988.
A week of Celebration
Port Discovery opens to the public Dec. 29, but this week several limited-audience events are scheduled at the museum, which is still under construction in the Fishmarket Building at Marketplace:
* Tuesday: U.S. Education Secretary Richard W. Riley will speak at an invitation-only reception for Baltimore's education and cultural communities.
* Thursday: TV talk-show host and Baltimore native Montel Williams will emcee an invitation-only gala.
* Friday: TV talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell will lead a "move-in" open to museum supporters. From 10:30 to 11 a.m., O'Donnell with mingle with the public outside the museum.
* Saturday: Actor Michael J. Fox will emcee a breakfast for "First Families," major contributors.
The Grand Opening
Tuesday, Dec. 29: The opening celebration will be held from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., with the Ravens' marching band and cheerleaders, speeches, the Dream Squad character puppets, confetti, balloons and nurf cannons.
Admission: $10 for adults, $7.50 for children 3 to 12 and free for children under 3. The atrium, an irreverent cityscape where programming will take place, will be free.
Pub Date: 12/06/98