Kids in the Hall


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Published: Sep 10, 2008

"In many ways, this is like the ultimate recycling project," says Please Touch Museum spokesman Frank Luzi. "Almost any museum is like that — they show artifacts of something. Ours is artifacts of play."

In its expansive new home, the Please Touch is not only recycling artifacts, from the SEPTA bus and Captain Noah set, Lit's Enchanted Colonial Village and the century-old Woodside Park carousel, but the building itself is being renewed. When it opens its doors on Oct. 18, the Please Touch will breathe fresh life into Memorial Hall, the architectural gem built for the 1876 Centennial World's Fair that has been neglected and underutilized for decades.

After the Centennial, Memorial Hall housed the Art Museum until its iconic present building opened in 1928. It then housed exhibits, offices for the Fairmount Park Commission, and recreational facilities including a boxing ring and Olympic-size swimming pool.

The PTM's $88 million restoration molds the building's architectural grandeur into a monumental playscape, bifurcated into real-world and imaginary play halves, dominated by a Philly skyline and enormous treehouse, respectively. Downstairs, the building's backstory will be told in an exhibit for an audience whose "notion of history is what they had for breakfast or whether they had a dream the night before," according to VP of exhibits Willard Whitson.

"Philadelphia really soared in the 1870s," explains PTM president and CEO Nancy Kolb. "And if you read the press at the time, we weren't bitching at each other. Nobody was there saying, "This will never happen.' I brought the mayor in here and said, "We have to make this the metaphor for going forward in Philadelphia.'"