It’s summer, the opening of the grand, new premises of the Please Touch Museum—the region’s only dedicated children’s museum—is just a few months out, and things are falling into place. The renovation and restoration of the museum’s elegant new home, Memorial Hall, are still underway, but already the skeleton of a children’s wonderland is being assembled. Branches of a towering, synthetic oak tree are being attached in one wing, and a cityscape is taking shape in another.

But somewhere in between, discussions are still underway. Nancy Kolb, the museum’s president and CEO, a dynamo in a pantsuit with the energy level of a Please Touch client on a sugar high, and Willard Whitson, the museum’s amiable vice president of exhibitions and education, are caught up in a debate during a walkthrough of the museum’s temporary exhibition gallery.

“We’re opening this gallery with the Enchanted Colonial Village,” Whitson remarks. “But we won’t have it installed for the opening of the museum.”

“Say that again?” Kolb asks sharply.

“We won’t have it installed for the opening presentation of the museum in October. We’re planning on opening it in November,” he responds.

“I thought we were going to come out of the box with it,” Kolb insists.

“It will be here. It won’t be installed. We won’t be ready to do that.”

Kolb turns to me. “We’re still discussing that.”

Whitson tries again, and again Kolb turns.

“We’re still discussing that,” she says with finality.

After all, if the Please Touch Museum was a rough-and-tumble Philly kid used to making do in over-crowded quarters on 21st Street, it’s now an elegant Main Line debutante, ready for its spectacular coming out.

And Kolb wants to be certain that everything is in place.

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What’s most astounding about the Please Touch, set to reopen on Oct. 18, is the scale of its transformation.

Whitson notes that a perennial kid favorite, the pint-size grocery store exhibit, will be transformed from “a mom and pop grocery store into a supermarket.” The same could be said for the museum itself. The exhibition space will more than triple, from 11,000 to 38,000 square feet; the annual operating budget is set to shoot from $4 million to $9 million; and full- and part-time staff will increase from 70 to around 120 (mostly due to additional workers manning the suddenly sizable museum floor). As for parking spaces, which previously numbered exactly zero, there are now around 280, a major relief for suburbanites.

And all this is balancing on the assumption that the number of annual visitors will balloon accordingly, from around 180,000 in recent years to 476,000, (even as admission prices shoot from $11 to $15 for parents and kids alike). But, Kolb insists, “We’re rightsizing this museum for the market.” She’s hoping that, in addition to the more gracious premises, the creation of a newly formed and soon-to-be heavily marketed “Centennial District,” encompassing the Please Touch, the Mann Center and the Philadelphia Zoo, will draw the hordes.

But the transformation of the Please Touch Museum goes beyond the physical. The Please Touch is suddenly in the midst of a major image overhaul as well.

One local mom describes the old premises in Philly’s Logan Circle neighborhood as a place where she recalls nothing so much as stained carpets, screaming children and the most intense morning sickness of her life. It’s hard to relate that space to the new one, which, before even opening, is already the hottest event space in Philadelphia. Brides and bar mitzvah boys are already duking it out for dates at the Max and Me-catered facility, which rents for up to $12,000 for a single evening (or, more realistically, $3,500 for just the Great Hall, which can seat 450 for dinner). “It’s society weddings and high-end bar mitzvahs. It’s the groups that are really going to pull out all the stops and bring all the extras with it” that are booking the space, says Scott Swiger, the Max and Me general manager hired specifically to run the Memorial Hall facility. By summer, he already had 40 events on the books through 2009.

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Concurrently, the Please Touch also seems to be the “it” place to spend your money when you have some serious donating to do—although people aren’t spending quite enough just yet.

By late July, the museum had raised $71.2 million toward the $88 million capital campaign planned to underwrite the move to Memorial Hall. “The most money this museum had ever raised before that was [for a] $3.7 million [expansion at 21st Street],” says Kolb, “so we’re pretty happy that we’ve been able to do that.”

But being this far short of their fund-raising goal just weeks from reopening is far from ideal, especially when the costs of construction materials have skyrocketed, turning what was initially announced as a $72 million project in 2005 into an even larger endeavor. When you consider that the funds raised so far include $46 million already in the coffers from a previous fund-raising push for a planned—and abandoned at a cost of $10 million—move to Penn’s Landing, it seems there’s a long way to go. The museum has taken $60 million in debt to cover the difference, and has the old premises on the market for $8.5 million.
The thing is, Kolb is convinced that once more donors see the new museum they’ll be motivated to give. That’s why she and other staffers and volunteers have taken literally thousands of potential donors on hardhat tours of the site, eliciting more than 1,000 gifts so far.

They’re on the right track, in that the Main Line roster of donors—including the more than 200 V.I.P.s (and plain old I.P.s) listed on the rather large gala committee—features some of the heaviest hitters in philanthropic society. In fact, it seems anyone who’s so much as suspected of being anyone is pledging support—or has at least been approached for it. Kelly Resinger, the museum’s vice president of development, says their so-called friend-raising has been “infectious.”

“The other day,” she says, “we had people addressing envelopes for gala invitations and we had probably 50 Main Line women—and one man—coming to Anne Hamilton’s house to write invitations. And what was terrific about the day was that most of these women brought their own personal mailing lists and names that we don’t have. They get so excited. They come on a tour and then they say, ‘Can I bring my friends on a tour?’ And so we’re getting into second and third generations of friends [bringing groups].”

The Hamilton Family Foundation, for example, donated $1 million, (with another $1 million donation from Dorrance “Dodo” Hamilton herself). But Anne Hamilton, a co-chair of the museum’s gala opening, says it’s more than the museum’s newfound cachet that drew her in: “I’ve been involved in the Please Touch Museum for over 25 years,” she says, since her children were little. As a mother of five, (who isn’t shy about mentioning that she had hoped to be a grandmother by the time the museum opened), Hamilton is one of the big-name Main Line philanthropists who has led the Please Touch push. And if the upcoming gala is any indication, the push is working. “We have a very large committee for the gala—the largest committee we’ve ever had,” she says. “We’ve got everyone from young to old. We’re hoping for 1,000 people at the gala, from all walks of life.”

That’s important, she says, in a time when demands on the philanthropic community are myriad. “I’m finding that throughout the community in Philadelphia, less and less people have the time to volunteer,” she says. “Some are not volunteering and are going back into the workforce” instead.

Even Resinger admits that it’s not simple to recruit donors—which is why the Please Touch has recently added a handful of fundraising and development staff. “Securing a seven-figure gift really takes time,” she says—sometimes as long as two years. “I always say it’s called development for a reason. You’re cultivating a relationship and you get out of it what you put into it. We’re not looking for giving a gift and then walking away. We’re looking for a relationship with the funder.”

Berwyn’s Sue Shea is a good example. She’s a co-chair of the gala committee, and she and her husband gave $1 million to the capital campaign. The former special needs teacher and frequent Philadelphia school volunteer said the Please Touch was a cause she felt compelled to support. “When I saw the Please Touch and saw that magnificent Memorial Hall, all I could think of was bringing these little children there,” she says. “I just thought, ‘I have got to be a part of this, and I just cannot wait to begin filling it with children from different parts of Philadelphia.’”

Since then, she says, “I have brought maybe 50 people in on tours,” including the vice president and the provost of Boston College and two separate busloads of friends. “It’s magic that’s happening in Philadelphia, and I wanted them to see it,” she says. “And they all just flipped out. A lot of them never knew the building existed, and they are just blown away by what Please Touch is doing to bring it back to its original beauty.”
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Going shopping at the Please Touch? Here’s what your money can buy (beyond, of course, that warm fuzzy feeling of doing good): $250 slaps your name and message on a paver at the museum’s front entrance, $50,000 gets you a coat room or a family restroom, $100,000 claims stroller parking, $3 million buys bragging rights for the south foyer, and $5 million puts your name on the entire Great Hall.

It’s philanthropic, sure, but it’s also a prestige thing, with names like Annenberg, Haas and Shea getting prime billing.

Of course, money is money, and sometimes the relationships aren’t ideal.
Take, for example, the museum’s corporate sponsors—many of whose names appear on product-related play areas that are soon to entice your impressionable tots. Most parents will shrug—or even admire the realism—in the transportation exhibit dubbed Roadside Attractions, where kids can pretend to drive a real (but retrofitted) Toyota Scion after pumping make-believe gas at a Hess brand fueling station.

But downstairs, where the restaurant exhibition is sponsored by—and looks very much like a—McDonald’s, parents may not be so sure. But, McDonald’s, which is also naming the museum’s basement theater—where the Please Touch Playhouse stages regular kid-friendly shows—contributed $730,000 to the capital campaign. “McDonald’s came forward very early to support us. This came about many, many years ago,” Resinger valiantly explains. “They’ve been a generous supporter, and we will offer children healthy options in the McDonald’s.”

After all, museum-fabricated leaves don’t grow on trees, and just like everyplace else in America, this is to some degree a commercial space. So, the Water Play section of the River Adventures exhibit is branded by Aqua America, the water utility; US Air stakes its claim on a segment of the Flight Fantasy exhibition; the supermarket play area is a ShopRite; and the medical center is sponsored by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. To parents, it might all seem a bit jarring; but to put together an $88 million museum, there are a few compromises you might have to make.

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Still, when it comes down to it, there’s one simple reason why everyone wants a piece of this place: This is a project that inspires.

Non-believers, consider the marble restoration work on the floor of the building’s Great Hall. “The marble restoration company that was doing it went out of business,” says Kolb. “This is their last project. They walked off of all their other projects and are determined to finish this one.”

After all, the Please Touch Museum’s spectacular revival of Memorial Hall (on an 80-year, $1 lease from the city) is near miraculous. The structure was one of the first Beaux Arts buildings in the United States, and it’s the largest remaining building from the U.S. Centennial of 1876, an event that drew 10 million people or a quarter of the nation’s population. But while the Please Touch was stagnating on 21st Street—they’ve been seeking to move for some 11 years now, delayed in part by the frustrated plan to move to Penn’s Landing—Memorial Hall was suffering its own period of neglect and abuse.

“The city had turned it into a recreation center in the 1950s, so it had an indoor swimming pool, two basketball courts, a boxing ring and a tennis court, the accident investigation division of the Philadelphia Police Department complete with four jail cells, and the offices of the Fairmount Park Commission,” Kolb says. “We are taking it back to its original use. Until 1958 it was the Philadelphia Museum of Art and after that it had a long and checkered career of neglect. Not anymore.”

Still, it’s a fine balance between preserving history and creating a kid-friendly playland. What’s historic is treated with reverence here: The ornate Great Hall at the heart of the building has been restored down to the original colors (ascertained through paint analysis)—but with plenty of acoustic baffles to make bearable the screams of several hundred over-excited children. Sixty-five foot ceilings, intricately carved moldings and graceful plaster figures rescued from other long-razed Centennial structures make this an overwhelmingly elegant space. Downstairs, there’s a scale model of the entire Centennial grounds.

Other nods to the past include artist Leo Sewell’s Arm and Torch sculpture—a 40-foot creation made from the candy-colored discards of childhood toy boxes—a reminder that the then-brand new Statue of Liberty’s actual arm and torch were once on display at the 1876 Centennial, in a fundraising pitch to build a pedestal. A new glass addition houses one of the museum’s prized possessions: a 1924 Dentzel carousel originally operated at Philadelphia’s Woodside Park, with all 52 carousel animals restored for exhibition and lit with more than a thousand bulbs. And there are other Philly childhood classics: the much-debated Enchanted Colonial Village—which will, in fact, be ready for the museum’s opening—the monorail from the Wanamaker’s toy department and the set from the long-running television show Captain Noah and His Magical Ark.

But the remainder of the now 150,000-square-foot building has been utterly transformed: The hole that was a swimming pool has become an Alice-worthy Wonderland, accessed from above by a spiraling ramp and shaded by an enormous fiberglass oak tree, with funhouse mirrors, a hedgerow maze and a tea party space below. There’s a cityscape, with a skyline, a park, street vendors, construction rigs and more—all in a technicolor palette with a sort of larger-than-life approach to realism. In the new Flight Fantasy exhibition, kids can build their own foam flying machines and then launch them, learning a little about aerodynamics and a lot about creative play; an enormous target painted on the floor will allow them to measure the distances their contraptions fly. And in addition to the new exhibitions, there are also many of the old favorites: “If we didn’t have the Septa bus,” says Kolb, “we would have 4-year-olds picketing out there.” The same goes for exhibits like the grocery store and the river adventure, which are back but bigger than ever.

And downstairs, a separate school group entrance looks like an old-fashioned train depot, while event rooms promise enough space for four birthday parties at once. “Which is sort of a nightmare when you think about it,” Whitson admits with a grin.

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These exhibits may be geared toward kids, but the grown-up set is certainly buzzing as well. Swiger is letting his imagination run wild with ideas: serving upscale twists on street vendor food in the cityscape (one can almost smell the Kobe beef sliders), or presenting dishes from the midst of the Water Play river (where guests may be hoping for tuna tartare).
And Shea says the Oct. 3 opening gala—set to be a purple-themed event complete with purple carpet and purple attire—will feature food served on wagons and in Frisbees throughout the various exhibits. “It’s not a fancy, stuffy black-tie event,” she insists. “It’s a festive, don’t-forget-kids-and-free-play gala.”

Still, Kolb says the museum will never close early for private events. And the core audience of the museum will stay the same: kids under 7, though there are more activities for older children up to age 12 and separate toddler zones where little ones can stay clear of the fray.
And throughout the museum, there will be cases displaying the museum’s extensive collection of toys dating from 1945 to present. After all, she says, “play is the work of childhood,” a serious business, so why not show toys accordingly?

Trust the Please Touch to give play a sense of gravitas.