The Grove Project

The Children’s Museum, downtown Wilmington

Beautiful weekends like the last one are great times to go downtown. In winter, the air is clear and bright, there are people out strolling but not the jean-short hordes you see in summer.

The Children’s Museum of Wilmington, which moved downtown from its original location farther east on Market St., has really grown on this family. Things looked, on our first visit or two, a little random. The museum is organized into areas that engage the kids — an art activity room; a camping area with tents and rubber fish on the fire; a large, nautically-themed space featuring a pirate ship with an air-compressor canon you can fire, a theater area with a TV production basement just for media locals; and many others.

You are invited to walk around, play, manipulate, sit at mini-chair stations and construct things like bird-feeder-goodie-necklaces with Crackin’ Oat Bran. There are all sorts of objects to engage you, strewn haphazardly — costumes, fake vegetables and checkout stands in a Lowes-sponsored shopping corner, glow-in-the-dark snorkeling goggles, exotic local animals when they’re in season. There’s a giant, overused Thomas the Tank Engine train set on the main floor that subverts all the kids away from the more museum-like projects.

That’s the thing. The requisite sponsorship flags are everywhere, there are flyers and color themes and people in official vests, but the place just seems…odd the first couple times you go. Odd and expensive. Tentative. This is a kids’ museum?, you want to ask. The first time we went the “toys” and objects to play with in the shopping area were empty macaroni boxes that had been taped back shut and used milk cartons.

But you can really warm to the desultory, paint-outside-the-lines feel. We have. More like a very interesting friends’ house than a cordoned gallery, the place is casual but always full of good stuff, always changing. It uses its resources, doesn’t seem interested in any sacred museum cows, for kids’ museums or otherwise, and most of all is bent on doing rather than looking.

And is the occasion for my posting some pictures from our walk downtown.

View of Front Street from the parking deck

Nope. An all-too-common sign downtown:
This one says the store has stopped opening on weekdays, and is now open only on Saturdays and by appointment.

South Front Street

Old retail space that’s just been renovated and is available to rent for anyone but bars and night clubs!

Scruffy and pleasant Ron Paul supporter exhorting us to legalize the Constitution

Civic debate

[where: 28401]