Martinex1: I remember several outings to the museums and zoos over the Summer months while growing up. My dad would pack us into the car on a weekend and we'd make our way to the city to the museum campus in Chicago and visit the Field Museum of Natural History or the Museum of Science and Industry. Occasionally we would go to the Adler Planetarium or the Shedd Aquarium or the Art Institute of Chicago.
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| Museum of Science and Industry |
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| Adler Planetarium |
Some trips were successful and others not so. I think the success of the trip depended on the age and the relative interest of the many kids and personalities involved. I gravitated toward the Museum of Science and Industry where experiments were demonstrated, visitors had access to a WWII submarine, and most every exhibit was hands-on. It is still a favorite today. There you can ride through a coal mine or experience a tornado; they often freeze balloons in liquid nitrogen and have interactive exhibits. The Field Museum however had the T-Rex bones, historical artifacts, and many detailed displays, but it is a little too dry for the kid still inside me. I can remember some complaints of "boredom" during walks through ancient jewelry and statues. When I go with my kids, I still hear that echo of childhood frustration.
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| Dinosaur "Sue" in the Field Museum atrium |
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| Submarine in the Museum of Science and Industry |
On other days we would make our way to the zoo. Chicago has two zoos with the sprawling Brookfield Zoo in the nearby suburbs and the Lincoln Park Zoo near the city lakefront. That zoo was featured on the morning kids-targeted
Ray Rayner Show as well. While I liked the zoo, I cannot say it was my prime choice for an outing. However, my youngest son loves monkeys so we do go and see those occasionally.
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| Ray Rayner and Friends |
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| The sprawling campus of the Brookfield Zoo |
How about in your city or town; are there museums and zoos you gravitate to year after year? What do you recommend? Are these types of outings still popular with your family?
Or were there school field trips that are memorable? What was your favorite educational attraction?
Cultural and intellectual outings to zoos and museums are the focus of
Short Cuts today!
13 comments:
Well heck, MX, let my just copy/paste your post and use about 80% of it for my own, eh? Our little Michigan town was only about 90 to 100 miles away from that Lake Michigan shorefront museum campus, so it was a very common destination for "big event" elementary school field trips (until budget cuts ended all field trips completely), and a fair number of family day-trip outings as well. There's just a wealth of wonderful crystal-clear memories associated with so many of those visits.
Science & Industry Museum probably remains my favorite, although neither the coal mine exhibit (terrified of the high corrugated walkway to get to the entrance) nor the Japanese submarine (tight quarters, and you had to bustle through too quickly) caught my fancy as much as many of the other exhibits. The HUMONGOUS model train layout on one of the main floors was always hard to pull away from, of course. A whole series of (likely temporary) interactive exhibits sponsored by the petroleum industry was there for most of my childhood years-- "Pet-ro Chem-i-cals, Pet-ro Chem-i-cals-- tra-la-lalala. . ." The tilted Paul Bunyan house which also utterly freaked me out as a very young child (as it did a huge number of little kids, with the giant face and animatronic eyeballs in the big window a couple of feet away). And in the main room of the biology area/wing was a major exhibit on human development which included a large wall display that I'm pretty sure would create a huge ruckus today and wouldn't be permitted: a series of small tanks each containing a human fetus, depicting the stages of fetal development from a barely-visible cluster of cells all the way to a fully-gestated baby-- the latter being deeply disturbing to a child, of course, but incredibly fascinating nonetheless. My Mom wasn't up to the task, I'm afraid, of providing adequate and/or comforting explanations.
Fields Museum was indeed pretty darned dry at the time for active kids-- and their dinosaur hall (pre-Sue) didn't live up to the hype. The bigger draw at that point was the Ancient Egypt exhibit which included a mummy whose toe they had unwrapped so that you could see it was really a person in there. Their wildlife dioramas were pretty good, though-- although it's a little depressing for a kid to view room after room of dead animals.
Greenfield Village/Henry Ford Museum in the Detroit area (Dearborn, MI) was a pilgrimage we made. The coolest thing from the childhood trip was the size of the ENOURMOUS train engines they had on display inside the building, as well as all of the antique vehicles. I took HBSon during a trip when he was about 6 or so, and we had about as good a time as anyone ever could (17 years ago or so?). The museum in particular had improved and grown nicely over time.
Our own little hometown (Cassopolis, MI) has a tiny little historical "museum" at the side of the small lake, downtown. The Log Cabin Museum-- built presumably by Lewis Cass (our town and county's namesake). Two rooms, and a little upstairs loft you could go into. Packed with second-hand display cases filled with a comical assortment of random, unrelated artifacts. Many items had no discernible relevance to Lewis Cass, the history of our town, or the region, or even Michigan itself (To wit: the FAVORITE artifact in the place for us kids was a 4' stuffed alligator that resided fiercely atop a glass display case. No explanation. Just a thing that found its way into the collection.) Our elementary school was maybe 3/4 of a mile at most from that part of the village, so every spring one of the very last days of school was spent on a field-trip walk over to Stone Lake to visit the museum and have lunch in the little park there. Where we would also climb on the little Civil War cannon that pointed out over the lake. Again-- why was it there? No historical relevance at all-- but it looked nice. Heh.
HB (full of overlong reminiscences!)
Love this topic, museums and zoos have always played a big part in my life. My earlier childhood was in New York City, and hands down my favorite trip was always to the American Museum of Natural History, to this day that's my favorite destination.
Later on I grew up in New England, and loved visiting the New England Aquarium (will always be my sentimental favorite aquarium).
I had never traveled to Chicago as a kid, but as an adult my wife and I have settled in Columbus Ohio and now get over to Chicago quite regularly (I absolutely love that city). We have kids now and got to experience as a whole family wonderful places like the Museum of Science and Industry (can't believe the staggering size of that place), the Field Museum (my #2 Natural History destination now after New York), along with of course the Shedd and the Adler.
We are also fortunate to have one of the largest zoos in the nation here in Columbus, at one point when our kids were very little we lived practically down the street from it and made quite frequent use of our membership!
Good topic, growing up in Richmond, we had our own Science Museum (much smaller than Chicago's), which was fun on a hot day. We didn't have a zoo, but he had Maymont Park, which had deer, bears and foxes. One of the foxes had three legs and was something of a local celebrity for many years.
I made it to the Adler Planetarium and the Field Museum back in 2001, had a great time at both.
Maymont!
Holy cats, Maymont Park-- we took a Richmond family vacation about 10-12 years ago, and Maymont was one of our favorite days!
There were also some buffalo in an enclosed field up in a corner-- kind of off the main circuit. We were petting and scratching them through the fence (which they seemed to love) until a guide finally caught sight of us and admonished us 'cause these were large, dangerous animals, etc. (Who clearly loved being petted and handled, mind you. . . )
The little Richmond Zoo was rather a gem, too. Small, friendly, with a terrific feed-the-giraffes exhibit.
Good one, J.A.-!
HB
Ditto to Marti’s descriptions of Chicago museums.
I would add the University of Chicago’s Middle-Eastern (“Oriental”) Museum. It’s world class and free and easily digested in half a day! My kids love going, more so as they age!
Plus, The U of C is something special…
Driving there can be an education in urban desolation and poverty (think Killraven)!
The U/C itself is an oasis in the middle of this and worth visiting (think Attilan pre Copper and Current Age absurdities)!
The U/C is one of the world’s top-5 brain trusts (think benevolent versions of Braniac and Norman Osborne walking around) which has a crazy number Nobel Prizes (like Parker has clones). Like their t-shirts say, “U/C: It’s where fun goes to die!”
As a kid, the experience of touring Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry’s Nazi U-Boat 505, with my Uncle who was picked up adrift in the Arctic Circle, by the Nazi submarine (U-209) that shot at his ship, was priceless.
From a comic’s perspective, he and those in his lifeboat, made it into the Sunday “Ripley’s Believe it or Not”.
(Here's the history lesson for today: Convoy PQ 17, July 1942 – greatest convoy slaughter in history. 60% of ships, 64,00 tons of cargo lost. Supposedly Stalin personally contacted Churchill, insinuating the Allies allowed the massacre to prolong the war and deplete the Soviet Union. 64,000 tons is equivalent of 10,500 Army trucks.)
Fun topic, great memories!
Like HB Greenfield Village/Henry Ford Museum was an annual event. Just love that place.
The Detroit Zoo was also a regular.
When I got my own family we would alternate annual passes between the Toledo Zoo and Greenfield Village-the Civil War reenactments and 19th century Baseball games were/are a blast!
Now that my kids are older we visit the DIA (Detroit Institute of Arts) regularly.
May I join the crowd of Chicago Museum fans? As a dinosaur/fossil devotee,I loved the Field Museum. Then in college, a field trip to the Art Institute was an annual event. What great weekends! Walking around downtown, late nights in the hotel, and checking out the current shows. The Van Gogh retrospective was amazing, but my favorite was the Edward Hopper show. The poster of "Nighthawks" hung on my wall for years.
Red - I had to google Nighthawks. Now I know the name of that! Good one!
Boy, this is funny how geo-centric the discussion has become-- who knew what a common experience going to those Chicago Museums would be? (We also hit the planetarium a couple of times in my child-hood-- the first time was a school-trip that turned into an epic drama of little kids having to ride the bus for too long, and REALLY needing to get to a bathroom once we arrived at the planetarium. The dire need of one particular-- uhmmmmm-- un-named-- *ahem* passenger had an astonishing psychosomatic effect on the rest of the kids, so that there was an unrestrained stampede in the parking lot to get inside-- teachers and chaperones left protesting in the asphalt dust. . . But I digress---)
My wife and I do enjoy zoos, AND my brother-in-law is a professional zoo-administrator and designer, so we've frequented his facilities as he's moved up the Zoo-Admin ladder over the years. He's in New Orleans at the moment.
Toledo Zoo is a nice one, Killraven! Kind of an over-looked gem, IIRC.
Dallas Zoo has some pretty good exhibits-- but it's just so flippin' hot.
And we used to live in a neighborhood in DC just a couple of blocks up from the National Zoo, where it sits next to Rock Creek Park. As with many folks who live right up alongside it in other neighborhoods, you start to take the unique little quirks for granted. Our early mornings were always started with the astonishing shrieks of the Howler monkeys- SO loud- and a bit later the roaring from the lion enclosure. Just part of the daily environment. The National Zoo is our "home" zoo-- but it's not the best one out there, to be honest. Very old "historic" enclosures that can be pretty dreadful for the animals they house-- and it's taking a long time to upgrade. Also, oy, it's built on a long, steep hill-!
OH! Dinosaur exhibits? Can I recommend Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History? Possibly one of the best dinosaur exhibits I've seen outside of the Smithsonian. And-- the Smithsonian's is in the midst of a years-long renovation shut-down, so it's not on the table for discussion. (Oh, those giant ground-sloth skeletons, though. . . )
HB
HB - I too am surprised by how many people made it to Chicago for those museums but living here I forget how world class some of those destinations are.
CH47 the story of your uncle is fascinating; interesting life and experiences.
Ewan I have been to the Columbus Zoo with my family and it is really top notch but I was so surprised there were no giraffes there. At the time my 5 year old loved giraffes and I thought the information person was joking when he said they did not have any there. Not sure if that is still the case or if there is a story why no giraffes - but how can the Zoo of Jack Hanna not have giraffes?
Honestly other than that it was up there with the San Diego zoo.
I'm happy to report the Columbus Zoo does now have giraffes (among a number of other newer animals after some large expansion activity)!
My guess as to why they were absent earlier may be because the giraffes were already covered at a sister location to the Columbus Zoo called "The Wilds" (out a ways to the east of Columbus). Also a great destination, it is a safari park versus a zoo, you can ride out in safari type vehicles and observe rhinos, giraffes, camels, etc. up close.
But I think the main zoo heard the message loud and clear...many of us were very excited to see the giraffes show up there!
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