Museum Hopes to Make Move to Balboa Park : Shift Would Make It Accessible to More Children

Troubled by surveys that show they are serving an increasingly narrow yuppie kid market, officials of the Children’s Museum of San Diego have proposed a plan to move to the site of the crumbling, 74-year-old House of Charm in Balboa Park.

The museum is failing to reach significant numbers of central city and South Bay families from its storefront in an enclosed La Jolla shopping mall, its director says. According to a 1988 visitor profile, the museum draws about 7% of its attendance from South Bay, 9% from East County, 20% from Center City and more than 60% from the affluent North County.

“We’ve had great growth, but the growth has happened mainly in North County areas,” said James R. (Skip) Pahl, the museum’s executive director. “We’re not accessible to many San Diego families. While La Jolla is beautiful, it’s just not accessible . . . especially for Hispanic families to visit. It’s out of their traffic patterns.”

The irony is that kids from inner city and lower income families enjoy the museum as much or more, museum personnel say, than others. This was demonstrated on recent visit by 90 unrepressed kindergartners from Sherman Elementary School.

The pint-sized museum-goers spread out in this touch-everything institution. They climbed into a dentist’s chair, handled replicas of a human liver and heart, and made beelines to the museum’s little stage.

After spotting a rack of clothes backstage, it took one group of kids about two nanoseconds before they were feverishly pulling on the once-elegant gowns, the battered football pads and helmets or the knee-high firefighters’ boots and headgear.

A few feet away, others performed on camera in the KKID News Room or explored a cave. They felt their way through a “sensory” tunnel or built castles in a room full of hundreds, if not thousands, of Leggos.

Afterward, young Antoinette Murphy said her favorite part was wearing “that green dress in the fashion show, the one that had gold on it.”

Jairo Miguel, a pupil in Delia Rodriguez-Correa’s bilingual class, liked all the toys but acknowledged that he was intrigued most of all by a midget airplane.

“I liked the wings and the seats and driving it,” Jairo said in

Spanish, which Rodriguez-Correa translated.

The key to these kinds of responses and to the growing national success of youth museums is that, “when kids relate to objects with all their senses, the learning curve is fantastic,” Pahl said. The number of children’s museums in the United States has doubled in the past two years to 400, he said.

The exhibits in the Children’s Museum of San Diego are designed primarily for kids ages 2 to 12 and play a key role in child development and education, museum officials say. Outside of the very limited school visits, children like Jairo and Antoinette from Southeast San Diego rarely get to enjoy the Children’s Museum.

The overwhelming reason for this imbalance, museum officials feel, is that the museum is located in the chic La Jolla Village Square.

That site was chosen when mall officials offered free rent on 5,000 square feet and plenty of parking, even enough for school buses. Kinney Shoes donated three-quarters of the rent on an additional 5,000 square feet. The Kinney lease was up in the fall, and the museum is negotiating with the mall for that part of its space.

The shopping mall was never envisioned as a permanent site when it opened in August, 1983, but the free rent and other amenities were essential for its first years, its board members say.

The mall’s remoteness to a major portion of San Diego families was pointed up in a 1988 Children’s Museum survey of adult attendance that revealed that, outside of school visits, the museum serves few Latinos.

Although the county’s Latino population is about 18%, Latinos make up only 5% of the Children’s Museum attendance, according to the survey. The museum does serve all areas of San Diego, especially through its program of school visits, but such visits account for only about 34% of last year’s attendance of 79,000.

To make the Children’s Museum more accessible to more San Diego families and to provide room to grow, the directors have formally proposed a costly plan to the City of San Diego to move the museum operations into the crumbling House of Charm after it is restored.

The move would put the museum in the same traffic pattern occupied by more than a dozen Balboa Park cultural institutions. By taking over the two-story park structure, the museum would quadruple its total space of 10,000 square feet.

The museum now has only 7,000 square feet of exhibition space, which Pahl says is small for a city the size of San Diego.

“Corpus Christi has 53,000 square feet,” he said. “San Jose is finishing one at 42,000 square feet. Brooklyn, the oldest Children’s Museum, has 35,000 square feet.”

Although its annual attendance has climbed to 79,000, the Children’s Museum trails that in Corpus Christi, which had 165,000 visitors in 1987, and Indianapolis, which had a whopping 1.5 million visitors in 1987, according to figures compiled by the American Assn. of Youth Museums.

But the Children’s Museum has jumped the gun in sending a proposal to the city. The city hasn’t requested proposals to occupy the House of Charm, but it is expected to formally do so soon, a Park and Recreation Department official said. There will surely be plenty of proposals, including one from being prepared by the San Diego Art Institute, which has occupied a section of the building since 1953.

Even so, Pahl and members of the museum’s board of directors said they are encouraged that Mayor Maureen O’Connor has named 1989 the Year of the Child. In her State of the City address last month, O’Connor even named the House of Charm as a site for children’s activities.

Hearing the mayor refer to the House of Charm as a center for children “was a dream come true,” museum president Barbara Bry said.

“I was there. Tears were coming down my cheeks. Of course, we’ll have to go through the whole RFP (request for proposals) process, and nothing’s certain.”

The museum has proposed that the city raze and restore the exterior shell of the 1915 vintage House of Charm and the adjacent colonnade. The museum estimates the cost of restoration on the same “footprint” of the existing building at $3.9 million, including replication of all architectural facade elements, and it would be paid for with revenues from last year’s increase in the hotel-motel tax.

According to its plan, the museum would raise $3.3 million to pay for the interior construction and outfit the building. The proposal calls for central themes in the new museum, ranging from exposing children to San Diego’s ethnic diversity and delving into childhood anxieties, to architecture, science and the language arts.

The museum estimates that its attendance would jump at the new location to almost 440,000. The Balboa Park site was the overall choice in an April-May 1988 survey of visitors.

The challenge to the board of directors inherent in their proposal is considerable, Bry acknowledged. “Our board is not ‘old San Diego,’ ” she said. “It’s not old, rich money, but a board of hard-working professionals. That’s what’s made the board go. They really do what they want.”

The new proposal calls for quite a financial leap. Although board members are encouraged by the progress the museum has made since its opening, they acknowledge they have to do a better job of marketing it.

“The schools know about it,” said founding board member Sandra Arkin, “but the people in the general community don’t.”