an awkward building offering exhibits and experiences that are interesting, educational and fun, even fascinating and important, but collectively fall short of appropriately stimulating a major 21st century city and a Downtown with our ambitions. MOSH had a major expansion in 1988, including the planetarium, and various renovations, and today the museum stands as. Quickly, its community appeal broadened to include all ages, so in 1977 its name was changed to the Museum of Arts & Science, then in 1988 to MOSH, reflecting that Jacksonville already had two art museums nearby and really needed a museum dedicated to helping us understand where we came from and the world we live in. So, again, the community responded and raised $1 million to build a much larger and modern museum on MOSH’s current site overlooking Friendship Fountain on the Southbank.Īt the opening in 1969, one national authority called it “the finest, most modern, beautifully equipped children’s museum in the entire United States.” By the early 1960s, the museum was drawing 80,000 visitors a year. You learned what you could about your world from stale textbooks and word of mouth.Īll else you had was looking forward to going Downtown once a month and experiencing the displays in the windows of the Barnett Bank building, produced by three school teachers dedicated to finding a new way to stimulate children’s learning.Įven for the time, it was very limited and static, so the teachers interested a group of people who created the Jacksonville Children’s Museum in a small space on the second floor of the Duval County Armory.Īfter World War II broadened Americans’ horizons, the Jacksonville Journal reported that “the museum had grown to such an extent and attracted so much community interest (that) it was able to open its own building,” taking over a 44-year-old former private home in Riverside. You couldn’t conceive of anything like television, and there was not even a science-fiction notion of an internet. Imagine … Well, first imagine for a moment being a child in Jacksonville in the 1930s when there was no MOSH. Imagine that place, as the new MOSH master plan does, becoming “an ideas lab that nurtures innovation, as a dynamic platform for learning, a center of community and a champion of social and environmental stewardship.” Imagine that big concrete monolith of the Museum of Science and History expanding, opening up to the park surrounding Friendship Fountain and creatively embracing the grand river that virtually defines this city. Imagine the Southbank blooming and booming, from the stolid, almost waste of a riverfront whose best appeal might be its view of the Northbank, into a grand campus teeming with people of all ages exploring, experiencing and learning.
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