February 16, 2024
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The Please Touch Museum will renovate its historic Memorial Hall building ahead of the site's 150th anniversary and the U.S. semiquincentennial in 2026. The marble floors will be replaced and facade repaired. A special 1876 reflection space will explain the building's use during the world's fair.
The Please Touch Museum has officially launched the first of many projects designed to give its historic home a facelift by 2026, which marks the 150th anniversary of the building and 250th birthday for the United States.
The children's museum kicked off 15 months of restoration work on Thursday to replace the marble flooring in Memorial Hall, the sprawling Beaux Arts building that debuted in 1876 as part of the Centennial Exposition, the first world's fair held in the U.S. The current tiles will be replaced with 10,975 squares of marble sourced from quarries in France, Spain and Italy — and currently on a boat en route to the museum.
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"We're doing all our prep work," Trish Wellenbach, president and CEO of the museum, said of floor project. "The marble is on the ship and on its way. And we wanna be ready to start as soon as it gets here."
The $4.2 million floor project is just one piece of the the wider restoration plans. The museum will also begin repairs on the north side of the building's facade this summer, and transform a meeting room on the other side of that facade into an 1876 "reflection space" that educates visitors on the history of the building and world's fair. Original marble floor tiles in good condition will be saved and installed in this room.
The museum is also in the middle of an assessment of the roof and the iron-and-glass dome, which Wellenbach joked has "actually been a little leaky since they cut the ribbon on the building in 1876." A nine-month project that wrapped in 2016 supposedly fixed the chronic drip, but the museum is taking another look for ways to reinforce the 8,000-square-foot structure.
Wellenbach is adamant that the renovations will not force the museum to close, or disrupt ordinary operations and visits. Any work that produces air particulates, the museum says, will occur in the early morning before business hours, under tents with HEPA filtration. The less hazardous floor work will happen in clear tents while the museum is open, so kids can see the construction up close. Museum educators will design pop-up play activities tied to the work, with themes of construction and fossils. Some of the old floor tiles actually have fossils that, according to Wellenbach, were embedded in the marble and came to the surface after years of wear.
Before the Please Touch Museum moved into the building in 2008, Memorial Hall had lived many lives. It functioned as an art gallery during the Centennial Exposition, and later housed Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art. After that institution was absorbed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and University of the Arts, the building was a rec center with a swimming pool and later a police station. It became a national historic landmark in 1976.
An illustration of the Centennial Exposition from 1876 features Memorial Hall on the left. Nearly 10 million people visited the fair.
The museum displays tokens of the building's history through a scale model of the fairgrounds, which has been stationed on Memorial Hall's lower level since 1901, and a replica of the Statue of Liberty's arm and torch made entirely of toys. (The actual arm and torch debuted at the Centennial Exposition to raise funds for the complete statue.) But the museum sees the 2026 projects as a way to better tie those threads together.
"I don't know that we've done that all that well up to this point," Wellenbach said. "Because it is so displaced throughout the building, there isn't a place. There are people that come to the building because they are deep history lovers, and we have to kind of send them around the building to find the different plaques and all of the narrative.
"This gives us a moment to do something different, which I really love."
The Please Touch Museum isn't the only one prepping for America's semiquincentennial in 2026. That summer, the city will bury a time capsule in Independence Mall, where it will remain until the nation's 500th birthday in 2276. Philadelphia will also welcome a new museum in the newly restored First Bank of the United States building on Third and Chestnut streets. The National Park Service has already planted 76 trees in Independence Park ahead of the coming celebrations.
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