A Center City Kid Remembers the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum

Children look at the bighorn sheep at the Academy of Natural Sciences museum. / Photograph by J. Fusco for Visit Philadelphia

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Somewhere in my storage unit, in a hoard of 20th-century remnants — like my “portable” computer that weighed 25 pounds — there’s a moldering cassette tape labeled “Liz lectures.” It’s a recording my father made when I was about four, the year I started torturing my parents with early morning presentations about animals. Every Saturday or Sunday, at around 6 a.m., I’d pull my little red wagon filled with plastic animal figurines to my parents’ bedroom and compel them, still in bed, to listen to an hour of “This is the rhinoceros. His skin is rough. He is dangerous!” My mother likes to joke that she and my dad came to dread the rumble of wagon wheels on our apartment’s hardwood floors.

The Academy of Natural Sciences museum was to blame for this turn of events. My lectures were modeled on those I saw at the Academy, when docents would bring live animals — skunks, porcupine, turtles and the like — out of their habitats to meet the children. Sometimes, we were allowed to touch the animals, albeit carefully. “Be gentle!” four-year-old me admonishes my father on the recording. Also: “Hippos eat popcorn. And swim in wooder.”

As a child growing up in Center City, my visits to the Academy of Natural Sciences exposed me to wonders of the natural world that weren’t otherwise accessible among the city’s concrete stoops and honking cars. I was absolutely blown away by what I saw there, as generations of children would be in the years to come. The museum trips marked the beginning of something for me: an understanding of my place in the world, and a lifelong fascination with animals.

Being at the museum also taught me that I wasn’t all bad. In school, I was reprimanded daily for talking too much and getting distracted, but at the Academy, I was silent and rapt. I loved every mounted stag beetle, every dusty diorama of big-horned sheep. Days spent at the Academy were better than birthdays, better than Christmas (well, Hanukkah, but that doesn’t sound as good). They set the stage for a life of giving back to animals — working at animal shelters, fostering kittens, adopting special-needs dogs; rescuing sugar gliders, mice, and rats; modifying my eating habits, and donating what meager funds I can.

Deputy editor Laura Swartz’s daughter at ANSP / Photograph by Laura Swartz

As I got older, and failed to remember to have children, life in Philly no longer included many visits to the Academy. I suppose I felt it was time to put away childish things, even though the museum was a fascinating place for adults as well. And this behavior — my ostensible abandonment of this great institution — makes me part of a problem that can no longer be solved.

The last day of operations for the Academy museum is September 30th; Drexel and Academy leaders have struck a deal to maintain the research and education arms of the institution, and are currently working to relocate some parts of the collection, but that will not keep the museum open to the public. The reason the museum is closing, according to officials at Drexel University, is due to the fact that, despite new programming and marketing efforts, visitor numbers never rebounded after the COVID pandemic, making it impossible to maintain a city institution that opened to the public in 1828.

Many Philadelphians obviously care as much as I do about the closure. Concerned residents came out last week to protest, shouting “Hey Drex, save T.Rex!” One parent told CBS News that the reason her son dreams of being a scientist is because of a childhood at the Academy.

I believe it. There were thousands, maybe millions, of kids who discovered themselves at the Academy — just like that bothersome little girl on the recording who learned, to her amazement, that the world was enormous, strange, ready for her curiosity. It’s enormously sad that future Philly kids won’t have the same opportunity she did to wreck their parents’ sleep. They’ll have to learn the hippo popcorn lore somewhere else.