Please Touch prepares for its big move

If a cultural organization's every act of ambition is to some degree a leap of faith, the Please Touch Museum is inching up to the greatest yawning gulf in its history.

In October, the 32-year-old children's museum will leave its squat, plain-Jane Center City brick home near the Franklin Institute for the grand marbled volumes of a renovated Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park.

Its annual budget will go from $4 million to $9 million, its exhibition space more than tripling to 38,000 square feet.

Reluctantly, the museum is making this transition after taking a hard look at its fund-raising drive and cutting plans for a $5 million reserve fund.

All this, while pinning its hopes on nearly tripling attendance - to an average of 476,000 from 180,000 visitors per year.

In some ways, the museum already has taken its big leap: It's well into spending its $44 million construction budget and already is putting the finishing touches on the renovation of Memorial Hall. Last week, in the enormous Beaux Arts souvenir from the 1876 Centennial Exposition, glaziers were putting in new Palladian windows. Roofers were working atop the octagonal carousel house, an entirely new structure that will house the restored Woodside Park Dentzel Carousel from 1924. Exhibits fabricated off-site will begin moving in this month.

Fund-raising for the museum's $88 million capital campaign still has a long way to go. With opening day a little more than six months away, the museum is $25.5 million shy of its finishing line.

Can it bridge the gap?

"I think we'll make goal, but not by opening day," says president and chief executive officer Nancy Kolb. "We've gotten money from people who didn't know our name five years ago, so it's a cultivation thing."

Whether it makes goal or not, Please Touch has taken out $60 million in debt to help cover the project's costs. Even if the full $88 million is raised, Please Touch does not plan to immediately pay down that debt, which is in the form of 30-year tax-exempt bonds.

The bonds carry an (average) fixed 4.93 percent interest rate, said Concetta Bencivenga, vice president of finance, while the museum anticipates a 5 percent to 6 percent return on investments made with a pool of money raised for the project's general support, which it calls the Museum Fund.

"The investment portfolio can grow and we can make sure those moneys are used to hold harmless the museum's general operating budget," said Bencivenga.

As for an actual endowment, Kolb says that line item had to be cut from the budget. "The reality is this project has taken 10 years, and that was the only flexibility we had," she said. "So any surpluses in operating in the first couple of years will go into a board-directed endowment."

Please Touch spent $10 million developing proposals and plans for a site on Penn's Landing, a project that never materialized.

Before its anticipated 480,000 visitors march through the front door, Kolb is giving regular tours to potential donors. What they're seeing is nothing less than an architectural rescue. Memorial Hall, from 1876, suffered decades of water damage, ham-fisted retrofittings (it recently housed both a pool and a single prison cell), and neglect.

Some of the spaces are getting mere stabilization and a new coat of paint. Each area of the museum will have its own child's-room-bright paint color to help visitors navigate the experience.

But other areas, such as the central entrance hall, have received painstaking repair of elaborate plaster work, ornamented columns, and niches for statues. The marbled floor has been restored. Plaster details, not too long ago disintegrating beyond recognition, are now sharply detailed, highlighted in a very grown-up color scheme of gold and brick-red.

The central hall will, however, contain one very child-like flourish: a replica of the torch from the Statue of Liberty rendered in a colorful palette of discarded toys, game boards, street signs, and other flotsam and jetsam collected by Philadelphia artist Leo Sewell.

Some of the new spaces will retain the intimacy of the Please Touch's current space, whose smallness and manageability are qualities that parents like.

But some of the vast new spaces, three stories high, will clearly not be like that, and the entire museum experience will change from something akin to gourmet boutique to superstore food warehouse.

So much bigger will the new Please Touch be that the current 90-minute stay is expected to grow to four hours or more. "I don't think you'll be able to do this experience well in one day," says Kolb. "You'll want to come back again another day."

The age range of the target audience also will expand. For preschoolers, there will be the supermarket and water games. Other children, to age 12 or older, can learn about the Centennial Exhibition via a 20-by-30-foot model of the Exhibition grounds.

For much older visitors, the museum is playing the nostalgia card (as it has in its current space), offering visitation with Captain Noah's TV set and the Wanamaker Rocket Express monorail from the store's old toy department. It hopes to lure carousel buffs with its newly restored 1924 specimen, which is on an 80-year loan from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

Many of the old, beloved aspects of the Please Touch will be a part of the new experience - the popular SEPTA bus, for instance - in brighter and enlarged forms.

The Alice in Wonderland experience will travel to Fairmount Park, but the new exhibit will have a circular sliding board.

"This time," says Kolb, "you're going to be able to fall down the rabbit hole."

The following grants and donations are in addition to the anticipated net proceeds of more than $5.5 million from the sale of the organization's current buildings.

Government funds

Commonwealth $18,960,000

Federal 6,859,723

Local 5,500,000

Major donations

$2.8 million

William Penn Foundation

$2 million

Hamilton Family Foundation

Pew Charitable Trusts

$1.5 million

Wachovia Bank

Annenberg Foundation

Delaware River Port

Authority

$1.1 million

Toyota

$1 million

Bill and Susan Shea

anonymous donor

$850,000

John S. and James L.

Knight Foundation

$845,000

Philadelphia Foundation

$750,000

Arcadia Foundation

$730,000

McDonald's Corporation

$525,000

Independence Foundation

$500,000

Connelly Foundation

Albert M. Greenfield

Foundation

Phoebe W. Haas Charitable Trust A (as recommended

by Carole Haas Gravagno)

Hess Foundation

Independence Blue Cross

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