The Academy of Naural Sciences

DUKES FANS: “Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.” Orhan Pamuk “Museums are managers of consciousness… great educational institutions… or propaganda machines.” — Hans Haacke I am a library and museum freak. A museum junkie. I have been one since I was a kid and my public elementary school took us to libraries and museums. I went to Masterman Junior High, some four blocks from the Ben Franklin Parkway, and friends and I regularly went to the nearby Central Branch of the Free Library, the Philadelphia Art Museum, The Franklin Institute, and The Academy of Natural Sciences. That love of museums continued into my adulthood, and I still visit museums. In fact today I am a member of the Art Museum, The Revolutionary War Museum, African-American Museum, The Woodmere, and The Barnes in Philadelphia, as well as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The American Visionary Art Museum and Reginald Lewis Black History Museum in Baltimore, and several Smithsonian museums in Washington, DC. I always say that if I am in a city for two or more days, one of the things I am going to do for sure is visit a museum. I am a museum freak. I bring this up because I learned yesterday that the Academy of Natural Sciences at 19th and The Parkway is closing at the end of September; September 27th will be the last day the museum will be open to the public. The research and collecting missions of the Academy will be continued, but sharing those findings and mounting special exhibitions for the public will stop. Hearing that made me sad. My wife and I, both educators, had taken tons of trips to the Academy with our classes, and I have some fond memories of particular exhibition experiences. I taught 7th grade American History, and we made good use of the exhibits showing the plant and animal life of these regions during the early colonial period of what was to become the United States. I have especially fond memories of the special exhibits in 2004 -2005 recognizing the centennial of Lewis and Clark’s 1804-1806 exploration of the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. Those were some of my favorite museum adventures. And I have memories, of course. of the dinosaur exhibits from when I was a kid. It was a special place in the city, and I will miss it. There are several reasons given for the closure of the museum The Academy was taken over by Drexel University in 2011, and the university has had some financial difficulties of its own recently. The cost of supporting an open to the public museum would be seen as an unnecessary expense, I imagine, and seen as expendable. Another major problem is that attendance never recovered after COVID. That is a problem a number of museums have been dealing with recently, and The Academy, like many of Philly’s other museums tried cutting its hours. That did not drive up attendance. Of course, times change, and as they do valuable things from a certain time can lose their importance or relevance. With the ability to reach so many places though computers and digitally, physically visiting a museum may not be seen as special anymore' I will go to The Academy at least once this month to see the current exhibit on Botany of Nations; a look at the Lewis and Clark expedition from an Indigenous people’s perspective. And I will go to say, “Goodbye” and, ‘Thank you” to a place that has been an important part of my Philadelphia story, I will miss that place.