The world’s oldest public art museum is considered to be Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Basel. The world’s oldest orchestra is said to be the Royal Danish (it dates to 1448).
Then there is the borough of Brooklyn, no slouch with its own famous firsts. In addition to Nathan’s Famous hot-dog stand and Junior’s Cheesecake emporium, it claims the world’s oldest children’s museum, founded in 1899.
Situated on a leafy corner of the Crown Heights neighborhood, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum commemorated its 125th anniversary last weekend with a daylong celebration. A few weeks earlier, its president and chief executive, Atiba T. Edwards, had his own anniversary — his first year on the job.
Appointed in November 2023, Edwards, 41, has faced the task of stewarding the institution, now one of more than 300 children’s museums globally, at a moment of municipal austerity.
The anniversary arrives in the aftermath of the 2019 decision to close the museum’s annex in the Dumbo neighborhood — the institution’s first expansion outside Crown Heights in its long history. It shut just three years after it opened and amid continued discussion over whom the museum ought to serve, a debate that mirrors the ever-present discourse around gentrification in Crown Heights.
The price of a ticket has tripled, to $15 today from $5 in 2008. Annual attendance has remained relatively flat, at around 300,000, compared with about 250,000 in the 2000s.
As was true a decade ago, 30 percent of visitors pay nothing (on Thursday afternoons Amazon sponsors free hours). Another 20 percent come in at a discounted rate.
“We have a standard policy: We never turn anybody away,” Edwards said in an interview earlier this year.
There was tension in 2015 over the museum’s plans for the Dumbo annex, with some staff members concerned that it reflected efforts to attract more moneyed (and inevitably whiter) visitors at the expense of local ones. The museum’s neighborhood has historically been dominated by Hasidic Jewish and Caribbean communities but has included more white residents in recent years.
“You can’t expand without decreasing the quality of programming that you’re doing for the families in that neighborhood,” Eric Adams (who is now, of course, the mayor of New York) warned when he was the Brooklyn borough president in 2015, referring to the annex, which was just across the river from Manhattan.
Around the time of its closure, Edwards was hired as chief operating officer. His life story reflects a traditional understanding of the museum’s base of support. A native of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Edwards grew up in nearby Brownsville — he recalled attending the museum as a boy — and graduated from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. He worked at J.P. Morgan Chase and a charter school before joining the museum.
When Edwards was named the leader, Chi Ossé, the City Council member in whose district the museum sits, said, “As I lived just a few short blocks away, it long served as a critical center of gravity for my childhood, as I’m sure it has for countless other children.”
“I am grateful to know this Brooklyn gem is in good hands,” he added.
Edwards said the museum had to be sensitive to its immediate neighborhood, yet also have its eyes on the whole borough. Its newest permanent room, “Nature’s Engineers,” has rotating monthly programming designed to educate in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Its calendar, Edwards emphasized, is packed with themed celebrations that reach beyond the communities nearest to the museum. So while there is Kwanzaa, Juneteenth and Tu B’Shevat (a Jewish holiday known as the “New Year of the Trees”), there is also Holi, Diwali, the Lunar New Year and Eid al-Fitr.
“We don’t narrow in — like, ‘This month, what are we going to do for this community in Crown Heights, the Jewish community, African-American, West Indian?’” Edwards said. “We are the nexus of all that. You extrapolate to all of Brooklyn.”
The window of the conference room in which he spoke provided a bird’s-eye view of World Brooklyn, an exhibition of interactive Brooklyn storefronts that consists of a gamut of diverse cultural representations: Italian pizza parlor, Caribbean travel agency, West African clothier, Chinese bookstore, Mexican bakery, city bus and, the museum’s most popular attraction, the International Grocery.
The museum also has a section for tots that is more or less just for fun — a water-play area (complete with stationary water shooters), a tunnel under a slide, a room for reading — and the second floor hosts an art room, a play kitchen and an area for rotating exhibitions.
“It’s one of the spaces where you learn cultural sensitivity, cultural competency — so many soft skills that you can’t really learn anywhere as a child, because school is very much right-or-wrong,” Edwards said.
That philosophy is not far removed from the one that guided the institution’s founding.
It was created as part of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, which also housed the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. When the Crown Heights-based Institute planned its move to a colossal new structure nearby on Eastern Parkway — now home to the Brooklyn Museum, an art museum — the neighborhood successfully fought to keep the children’s museum.
The Progressive movement at the time was highlighting children’s needs (one of its signature crusades was opposition to child labor) — “thinking about how children are not miniature adults,” said Jessie Swigger, a professor of history at Western Carolina University. Rather than being ushered into the marble temples housing great works of art, the thinking went, children required institutions suited to their particular developmental stages.
“That spirit,” Swigger added, “is still part of what children’s museums do today.”
Edwards was proud that there are fewer than a dozen televisions in the building. And he has observed that the children are not the ones with the most problematic relationships to technology.
“We’ll have a Code Orange,” which means a child is lost, Edwards explained. A parent, he continued, will abashedly tell staffers, “I was on my phone, and I looked up and they were gone.”
“It’s easy to be in a place but not be present,” Edwards added. “And our museum has always skewed toward analog.”
The post The Oldest Children’s Museum Strives to Be of Brooklyn (and Analog) appeared first on New York Times.
