A Look Inside the New Brooklyn Children's Museum

OMG this place is gonna rock. My kid and I went to the UWS kids' museum a couple of times and it always felt claustrophobic in there. Wacky competitive moms didn't help -- one was like literally fretting that her 10 month old didn't have teeth and mine did.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 10:39 AM

Aaaaaagh! Is new! Is new! Kill it! Kill it!

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 11:21 AM

Perfect example of your chemical Imbalance 11:06

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 11:22 AM

Very Oscar Mayer. The kids will dig this place.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 11:29 AM

This is great news. I have recently been to the children's museum in Pittsburgh and Providence which are amazing. It boggled my mind that these cities have these stunning children's museums while those in NYC are subpar at best. It's about time we got a decent one in Brooklyn, aka children central.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 11:44 AM

Although new and larger facilities will be good, what they really needed to do was maintain what they had. Kids have a natural tendency to move or take loose items, and to eventually break things from overuse. So many parts of their existing exhibits were worn out or missing -- even the temporary exhibits that were there just a few months. I NEVER saw staff wandering around to exert some kind of social control. It was as if the only paid staff was working the admissions desk. Compare this to the fantastic children's museum in South Norwalk CT, which has a staff member about every 15 feet. The Brooklyn Children's Museum needs funding for staff and maintanence far more than it needs new facilities.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 11:44 AM

"That building is hideous. Across the street from it are some of the most gorgeous old limestone buildings you'll find in NY, but they face this yellow monstrosity that is completely out of context with the neighborhood."

I live on Prospect Place between Albany and Kingston and I think it looks great. It doesn't fit into the context of the very stately Victorian buildings across the street on Brooklyn Ave. and St. Marks, but why MUSTY every single structure in the area be "compatible" with the area's historic housing stock? That's just silly. The design makes the place stand out as a bright and creative oasis among some very distinguished old buildings. What's wrong with that? Looks good to me.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 12:17 PM

FYI..The Brooklyn Children's Museum was the first children's musuem in the country. We didn't just get one. The large capital committment by the city and the state demonstrates the importance of being first in class.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 12:37 PM

That building is so ugly and out of context with the surrounding area.

I hope they manage to keep this one cleaner than the old one. In addition to always have broken and missing areas in most of the exhibits, the place was dirty.

I stopped taking my kids there because they always got sick or showed a rash right after each visit.

Anything that is touched, drooled on, handled the way the exhibits are designed to must be disinfected constantly.

They always had staff in the old place, but no supervision to make sure the teens were not huddled socializing in the corners instead of paying attention to the participants and exhibits.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 12:56 PM

Bitter impotent men and barren women please STFU and adopt. My kids love it as well.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 1:06 PM

My daughter asks me everyday when this place is going to open. Thank goodness it's almost done.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 1:21 PM

All new buildings suck. Landmark everything. I love vacant lots. Buck Fush. Free Mumia.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 1:28 PM

The museum, yes, has a look from its moment. Don't fault it too much. When it opened, no one thought it was that ugly and the look wasn't shocking.

One thing they wanted to do with it was to have it below grade to a large extent to minimize its impact on the neighborhood. Today, seems everyone wants to have as much glorifying impact on all their neighbors so the tendency has been to build up and up. Exhibit A: glass towers painfully out of place wedged into tight lots in the East Village surrounded by tenement buildings.

The museum has probably THE largest ground water heating systems in NYC. It is a major feature and should be talked about more often. It uses ground water as a source for its heat and cooling. This is major considering how much energy often mostly vacant museum buildings use.

FortGreeneGardener

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 1:31 PM

Awww maaaan. This place aint open yet? I was gonna take my neices who will be visiting from out of town this weekend.

But it's an addition. Is the original museum worth visiting at this time?

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 2:23 PM

"The programming was also so rigorously multi-culti that we suspected our Irish/German/Slavic kid could have gone a lifetime without seeing any of her cultures "celebrated.""

Ha, ha. Funny, and so true.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 3:08 PM

It's not easy being green, er, yellow.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 3:38 PM

McCulture.

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 4:04 PM

Brownstoner:

The Brooklyn Children's Museum and Brower Park are very different from what they were in the 1950's, when I lived in Crown Heights as a boy.

Back then, the museum occupied two mid-nineteenth-century brick houses with porches and "witch hat" roofs (that I'd learn later to call mansards) on the park's high points. They had white-painted walls and black trim, giving them a Hansel and Gretel air that beguiled us kids. And their setting in the lush park reinforced their other-worldly character.

Brower Park sat at the end of St. Marks Avenue, the neighborhood's best address at the time, where the big apartment houses and occasional mansion sat behind garden setbacks, making a spacious and dignified entrance to the park. I had several friends living on St. Marks, and to visit them was to step into a spacious and well-manicured corner of the neighborhood. The avenue was unusually wide -- not filled with perpendicular parking as it is now -- and lined by trees and apartment house canopies. Doctors affixed brass plaques next to lobby doors, proof positive of the thoroughfare's "class."

The museum buildings felt very much like the dwellings they once were. Pushing open the high arched, wooden doors kids stepped into stair halls with curving banisters and chandeliers. Steps and floors creaked. Exhibits, glass cases, and petting cages filled the parlors. Animal smells, funky and rich, hit us as soon as we crossed the threshold. Very different from today, museums didn't charge or ask "volunteer" contributions, making the Children's Museum our livingroom.

Brower Park was a place to play, hit the museum, and pick up a book at the Brooklyn Public Library's Bookmobile. A converted bus, this number would pull up at the park's corner to a line of kids, sometimes twenty or thirty long, patiently waiting their turn to peruse the shelves. With the museum, playground and Bookmobile, who needed anything more?

Not that everything was benign. The first time I was ever mugged was in Brower Park. A pal and I were hanging alone by the swings when a teenager walked over and shook us down for quarters. We didn't have any money, and to make sure we didn't, the kid calmly showed us his knife. (Kids had knives in those days -- not guns.) Since we still weren't forthcoming, the guy decided to hang out with us, kicking back on the bench and talking about the passing scene. Never saw him before or after. And I never mentioned the incident to my parents, for fear they wouldn't let me go to the park alone again.

The new museum building is striking, no doubt, and appears to have facilities beyond anything I could imagine as a youngster. But there was something to be said about the old buildings, their idiosyncracy, the way they sat deep in the park letting all that greenery suffuse with the surrounding blocks, that I'll be sure to miss if I visit.

Nostalgic on Park Avenue

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 5:35 PM

I remember this from when I was a kid (in the late 70's/early 80's). I absolutely LOVED the children's museum. I still remember getting absolutely soaking wet, moving little wooden boats in the moving-water exhibit that went through the tunnel.

Everything the parents are saying here about cleanliness, annoyance, aesthetics, etc makes objective sense to me.

But if they have the same folks doing this one as the original, kids are going to LOVE it for most of the reasons that adults are annoyed by it. OMG, this place was awesome!

Posted by: guest at June 12, 2008 7:25 PM

"out of context"--does that mean it doesn't match the adjacent 1960s school, 1970s nursing home, 1980s addition to the mansion across the street, trailer church with the roll-up door, or the trees in Brower Park? I'm confused.

Posted by: guest at June 14, 2008 2:29 PM