The first thing that hits you is the wall of sound: a hundred voices, all of them alternately yelling and laughing, followed by the thumpthump- thump of feet running in excitement. To the right a man sits in the back of an ambulance while a young doctor takes his vitals. She determines his injuries are minor and prescribes a bandage followed by a bear hug. Don’t worry: the “patient” is the father of the eight-year-old “doctor.”
It’s just a normal Saturday morning at the Children’s Museum Tucson (CMT), a place that’s fueled imagination and wonder since 1986. Today CMT serves more than 200,000 people each year at the historic Carnegie library building in downtown Tucson. It has the same core belief as it did when it opened its doors four decades ago: play is an essential part of learning.
Please Touch the Exhibits
In 1986, local public school principal Evelyn Carswell recruited a group of older adults, called the Grandparents Auxiliary, to open a hands-on museum for kids. The Southwest Children’s Exploratory Center opened that November in a small space on Pennington Street. It featured participatory exhibits covering a range of areas, including culture, arts and science. Unlike other museums, this one featured “Please touch the exhibit” signs throughout.
A merger with the Human Adventure Center in 1988 led to a name change — to Tucson Children’s Museum — and a relocation to the Historic Y on University Boulevard. In 1991, the museum moved again, this time to its present location in the former Carnegie Library on south Sixth Avenue. The historic Carnegie Library building was built in 1901 thanks to a grant by steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, who funded the construction of nearly 3,000 public libraries across the United States. The building served as the original Main Library for Pima County until 1990, when a newer and much larger space was constructed to serve as the downtown library. The library’s move to a larger space created an opportunity for the museum to grow as a nonprofit organization.
“We had a great group of founding leaders in the community who said we need a quality children’s museum,” says Executive Director Hilary Van Alsburg. “It was a grassroots groundswell of people who came together and said, ‘Let’s make this happen.’” In 2015, CMT partnered with the Town of Oro Valley to open a satellite location, Children’s Museum Oro Valley. Building on the success of that smaller location, CMT joined with Tohono Chul Park in 2023 to create 6,000 square feet of outdoor exhibits among a gorgeous desert botanical garden, giving kids an opportunity to learn about the culture, animals and plants of the Sonoran Desert. A clay studio, mud kitchen, indoor market and literacy area, and fairy garden are the centerpieces of the location, which is known as Children’s Museum Oro Valley at Tohono Chul (CMOV). The CMOV at Tohono Chul was an immediate success, with a 35% increase in visitors to the park during the first six months alone.
Challenges Meet Solutions
CMT continued its growth and picked up a few prestigious honors along the way. In 2016 and again in 2017, CMT was a National Medal finalist by the Institute of Museum and Library Services…