Please Touch Museum, Philadelphia, Part II

A continuation of yesterpost...

Back upstairs, we had fun at the Roadside Attractions area. Various mass transit and mass transport are on display, along with fun shops.

Roadside Attractions attraction

My Toddler the Bus Driver

An ice cream stand that, sadly, is fake

Scooping together

A special, temporary exhibit was "The Fantastic World of Dan Yaccarino" which ended on May 14, so it is already gone as of this post. Sorry! Yaccarino is a children's books illustrator. Both his work and other items inspired by his work were on display.

The Fantastic World of Dan Yaccarino

Drawings from "Little Boy with a Big Horn"

Story generator exhibit

Campfire in the area!

In the back corner of the museum is the Rocket Room, dedicated to things in space. My son enjoyed shooting little foam rockets in an attempt either to hit the other wall or to have the rocket fly through a rotating ring. My daughter loved being in Mission Control.

Rocket launcher

Mission controller

The ceiling and windows follow the space exploration theme.

Mobile of the planets

Sun and nine(!) planets window

Phases of the moon window

The other side of the museum houses a Dentzel Carousel. William Dentzel had a carousel in Woodside Park which he showed off to potential customers. He built several carousels over the years (there's one in Glen Echo Park in Maryland). This particular carousel has a long history, moving to Long Island and then New Jersey before being purchased by the Smithsonian Institution. In 2002, the Institution gave the carousel to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, which loaned it to the Please Touch Museum in 2005 for restoration and use in Memorial Hall.

Our children loved riding on it. It has sixteen stationary horses on the outside row and jumping horses, rabbits, cats, pigs, and goats on the two inside rows.

Woodside Park Dentzel Carousel

Detail from the top

Toddler on a horse

Daughter on another horse

Having fun

Having more fun

Having the most fun

In the same room are some Centennial Exhibition-inspired cut outs that let our children ham it up.

Visiting the exhbition

Who is your two-headed date?!?

The museum is a lot of fun and well worth visiting, even if the Yaccarino exhibit has moved on.

Please Touch Museum, Philadelphia, Part I

On our Spring trip to Pennsylvania, we visited the Please Touch Museum, a children's museum that's all about kids interacting with the exhibits. Like many children's museum, it was a hit with our children.

Big friendly letter, just like HHGG

Building exterior

In the lobby is a recreation of the Statue of Liberty's torch. It's made from toys and other bric-a-brac and is quite impressive, though our kids were not so interested in it.

Arm and torch from the Statue of Liberty (sort of)

The first exhibit we saw was the River Adventures, with lots of wet play stuff. The kids enjoyed playing with floating things and manipulating water with Archimedes' Screw and other gadgets (like canal locks) on display.

River Adventures section

Archimedes' Screw!

Duck Pond

A small tree house (though big enough for the kids to go in) had a fun periscope and a musical instruments.

Looking around the high tech way

Brothers make music

We had one of these as a kid!

The Imagination Playground lets children construct all sorts of shapes and structures from large, light-weight blocks.

Assessing the options at the Imagination Playground

Working together

Making arches

Crafting a slide

Posing on the slide

Downstairs is an Alice in Wonderland area with all sorts of optical illusions and fun mazes.

This hall looks longer than the building

Children forcing themselves into perspective

A nearby fairy garden has more musical fun.

Toddler makes music

The basement also has an exhibit on the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Philadelphia had a massive festival back in the day to celebrate America's Declaration of Independence (even though we didn't win independence till much later). There's a 20-by-30-foot model of the exhibition's 200 structures, including Memorial Hall which has been turned into the Please Touch Museum.

Centennial Exhibition exhibit entrance

Model of the Exhibition

The area also has a lot of model and toy trains for children to play with.

Building tracks

What's this station?

Also downstairs is the City Capers area, with recreations on a child's scale of various shopping experiences. They have a supermarket, a shoe store, a restaurant (fast food), and even a little hospital!

Shopping in the freezer section

The fish counter

Elvis "Pezley" Pez dispensers on display

More Pez dispenser on scale with the characters from Tolkien

My daughter as a shoe clerk

My toddler as an MRI patient (not sure patients should run the equipment!)

More on the museum in the next post!