Photo assistance from Jamie Wilson
TURNING 100 is a big deal, but what cocktail toast can do proper justice to an institution as iconic as The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis? Since its grassroots beginnings in a carriage house in 1925, it has enchanted generations—possibly your parents and their parents, and maybe your kids and their kids—becoming the largest children’s museum in the world and earning accolades such as the prestigious National Medal for Museum and Library Service. We decided the best way to celebrate this milestone was to take a walk through time, exploring what it was like for a child to visit the museum in every decade of its existence. So, let’s all take our seats. It’s story time.
1925
It’s December 1925 in Indianapolis, a city that boasts the Stutz Motor Car Company’s automobile wealth and the jazz-club fame of Indiana Avenue. As downtown Christmas shoppers marvel at L.S. Ayres & Company’s elaborate window displays—the department store’s third installment of holiday animatronics—Indy’s children of the Roaring Twenties (a generation that includes 3-year-old Kurt Vonnegut and 2-year-old Wes Montgomery) can now step into a world of wonder at the brand-new Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Housed inside the carriage house on the grounds of the Indianapolis Propylaeum at 1410 North Delaware Street, this pioneering institution is one of but a few in the country, following in the path of the Boston Children’s Museum and Detroit Children’s Museum.
Inside, schoolchildren’s donated artifacts—including geodes, fossils, and dioramas—fill a smattering of tables arranged out in the open instead of inside cases, in keeping with the museum committee’s idea that “the viewpoint of the child should be considered in providing for the equipment and installation of all materials.” The modest display owes its existence to Mary Stewart Carey, a civic dynamo and patron of the arts known for her work with the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Women’s Rotary Club, and the Orchard Country Day School. Carey’s passion for education inspired her to create a museum where children could learn through up-close exploration—a thoroughly modern idea.
Photo assistance from Jamie Wilson
1935/1945
Its artifacts having outgrown the original Propylaeum space, the Children’s Museum has settled into the founder’s own home—the grand Carey Mansion at 1150 North Meridian Street—and added programs such as guided school tours and summer Prairie Treks for collecting nature specimens. In an era defined by economic hardship and then war, the museum, which sits less than 3 miles from the city’s own Great Depression shantytown, Curtisville Bottom, provides a rare escape for visitors, some of them wearing seahorse pins to identify them as youth members.
Eleanor Roosevelt herself visits in 1937 to tour the museum’s collection of dolls made by WPA workers. The first lady later writes in her syndicated “My Day” newspaper column, “The collections are rather crowded as they are housed in an old building, but it is very charming and I wish that the director and his staff … might have an opportunity of telling other communities of what they have done, for it would undoubtedly serve as a much needed stimulus.”
Indeed, the museum’s first curator-director, former Morton Place Drug Store proprietor and naturalist Arthur B. Carr, has arranged the museum’s treasures into permanent exhibits. He holds the position until he retires in 1942 at the age of 70 and is replaced by Grace Golden, a champion of fundraising, corporate sponsorships, and growth.
Photo assistance from Jamie Wilson
1955/1965
Another move has rehomed the museum, now under the dynamic guidance of Golden, inside North Meridian Street’s historic Parry House, a limestone beauty embellished with columns and verandas purchased for $63,500. It serves as the anchor of a property gradually populated with add-ons and outbuildings to accommodate the growing collections. A 9-foot-tall taxidermy polar bear from the Bering Strait, a gallery of dinosaur skeletons (including Dinah, a cast of a fossilized giant ground sloth), and a 19th-century log cabin call the place home, enticing the first generation of kids who have color television sets in their living rooms.
One of the gleaming new structures, added to the property in 1962, is The Hall of Man, filled with pristine display cases. The Junior Docent program and two weekly television shows cultivate a love for learning and storytelling in the museum’s young visitors. In 1964, the volunteer-led Children’s Museum Guild’s first Haunted House—a walk-through horror show laid out inside one of the buildings used for storage, complete with a headless man and mechanical monsters—screams success and becomes an annual fundraising event.
Photo assistance from Jamie Wilson
1975
By the mid-1970s, the museum has undergone yet another major transformation, culminating in the completion of a state-of-the-art facility on the grounds of the now-demolished Parry House in 1976. With its flat, modular, unornamented brick facade—a departure from the extravagance of its previous abodes—this new museum is considered a marvel of brutalist architecture, with a modern aesthetic to match the institution’s big, forward-thinking ideas. At 225,000 square feet, it is officially the world’s largest children’s museum. First lady Betty Ford attends the grand opening and receives a commemorative museum poster, a watercolor painting of a green dinosaur signed and presented by its creator, kindergartner Brett Schneider. Now a senior engineer at Allied Automation, Schneider recalls, “It was supposed to be a profile, but it just looked like a one-eyed dinosaur.”
In this sprawling new iteration of the museum, kids raised by Cowboy Bob, Janie, and Sammy Terry roam five floors that promise big entertainment in the form of a restored and working 1917 carousel that once resided in Broad Ripple Park, a real mastodon skeleton, a simulated cave, and a 35-ton steam engine, the Reuben Wells, that had to be carefully rolled into the museum during construction, with the walls built around it afterward.
Photo assistance from Jamie Wilson
1985/1995
The world’s largest children’s museum continues to grow as its collection nearly doubles with a gift of more than 50,000 toys and folk art objects from Creative Playthings founders Frank and Theresa Caplan. Thanks to a new restaurant and outdoor garden, visitors to the museum can make a day of it once they pass through the four-story atrium entrance designed by Indianapolis architect Evans Woollen III and gaze up in wonder at the fluid workings of French physicist Bernard Gitton’s water clock. Standing more than 26 feet tall, this sculptural timepiece mesmerizes with its neon green pendulum and precisely arranged glass globes that fill with gallons of blue water and really do tell time.
And time is something that is easy to lose track of when there are Techno Parties to attend in the Computer Discovery Center and galaxies to explore in the SpaceQuest Planetarium. The ambitious Mysteries in History exhibit is a life-size diorama of structures from Indiana’s past (a log cabin and trading post, a brick-paved street, a Danners store) that visitors can walk through and explore.
Photo assistance from Jamie Wilson
2005
The big, round addition built adjacent to the museum in 1996 is already in its second era. Originally called the CineDome, a 310-seat theater that showed large-format films (always with the pre-show short film, Imagine Indiana, which included a heart-stopping POV from a small plane as it appears to stutter and nosedive over a rural barn), it has been reinvented as the immersive, dinosaur-themed Dinosphere. And this exhibit is terrifying in its own way.
Dinosphere: Now You’re in Their World is its full title, lending an appropriately gripping tone to the permanent exhibit that opens with a towering teenage T. rex named Bucky and a massive triceratops named Kelsey as pterosaurs soar overhead. SuperCroc, whose name says it all, stretches longer than a car. Walking into the Dinosphere is like stepping back 65 million years, especially with an ominous sound and light show simulating a prehistoric sky.
Even the logistics of getting into the museum have improved: A brand-new parking garage across Illinois Street makes visits easier for families to access the award-winning and nationally lauded venue, which now boasts a trio of alamosauruses, a mother and her offspring, bursting through its facade.
Photo assistance from Jamie Wilson
2015
A sign of the information-at-your-fingertips times, Children’s Museum 2.0 boasts a “Wikipedian in Residence” and has integrated QRpedia codes throughout its exhibits. But the real showstopper is the Dale Chihuly blown glass installation that fills the central atrium. The four-story masterpiece is among the artist’s largest works, composed of more than 3,200 blown-glass pieces intricately stacked into a cascade of color.
The lower level’s National Geographic Treasures of the Earth captivates future archeologists with its reconstructions of historic sites such as the ancient Egyptian tomb of Seti I, a Chinese archaeological dig with life-size puzzles of terra cotta warriors, and Captain Kidd’s Dominican Republic shipwreck, cannons and all. Other exhibits have started trending toward compassionate topics, as seen in The Power of Children: Making a Difference, which chronicles the lives of Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White, presented as heroes of the 20th century who overcame hatred and racism.
Photo assistance from Jamie Wilson
2025
A century after it welcomed its first wide-eyed guests, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis continues to enlighten and enchant all who wander its five levels of interactive exhibits. A new generation gets giddy over carousel rides, model trains, and the seasonal Riley Children’s Health Sports Legends Experience that offers 7.5 acres of sports-themed outdoor activities, like the world’s best recess.
But the museum’s fan club extends beyond children tugging at their parents’ hands. Grown-ups, too, beeline to the massive Transformers figure (from the 2007 movie) towering over the Welcome Center; the replica of the International Space Station featuring NASA astronaut David Wolf’s space suit; and the American Pop exhibit’s collection of music, toys, fashion, and plenty of, “Hey, I used to have one of these,” reactions. The immersive Mandela, a dramatic walk through the life of South African leader Nelson Mandela, puts the deep-rooted racism of apartheid into powerful context. It runs though January 20 and is not to be missed.
The museum has taken advantage of the pandemic closures of 2020 to refresh the Dinosphere, which now opens with a pair of colossal sauropods that span the length of the room. With their swooping necks and massive tails looking like a rollercoaster of fossilized and fabricated bones, these massive herbivores look fantastically realistic—not a day over 66 million years. They have aged well, and the same can be said of the place they call home.
After 10 decades, the children’s museum has kept Indianapolis young. May we never outgrow its wonder.
