Playtime Is Over : Funding Problems Force Long Beach Children’s Museum to Close

For nearly a decade, the Long Beach Children’s Museum was a place where toddlers could dress up in grandma’s flapper hat, fish from a wooden dinghy, sit behind the wheel of a real RTD bus, create puppet shows and run a make-believe hospital room.

But this weekend, museum directors will auction off what’s left of the interactive learning center, from the child-sized painter’s easels to the dress-up garb from Granny’s attic. Then they’ll lock the front door for the last time.

Funding problems have forced the nonprofit museum to close. In the past year, paid admissions have decreased by 15%, corporate donations have diminished and membership has lagged, leaving the museum far short of its annual $300,000 budget, said board president Tom Poe.

“We’re very sad about having to shut down,” Poe said. “But we’ve just run out of money.”

In its last days of operation Saturday and Sunday, families from throughout Long Beach and beyond packed the museum in the Long Beach Plaza Mall downtown. Many said they were unaware that the institution was closing.

“I’m just sick about it,” said Mary Russell, a Long Beach resident and retired elementary schoolteacher who brought her grandchildren, Susan, 9, and Eric, 3, to the museum several times. “Here, I know that everything they play with has an educational benefit. They may think they are playing, but I know they are learning.”

The exuberant toddlers who performed impromptu puppet shows, dressed up in outlandish costumes and played grocery store with child-sized carts and plastic food also seemed oblivious to the museum’s fate. Sunday was a noisy, boisterous, typical day for the little ones.

Long Beach resident John McDermott lamented as he watched his 2-year-old daughter, Caitlin, build a tower out of foam blocks. “There’s nothing like this in Long Beach,” he said. “It’s a loss for the community.”

The museum was one of the first in the area to offer exhibits, displays, visual arts and play-acting venues for children. It first opened at the Marina Pacifica Mall in 1985, and soon had to move to its current site, a larger space that could accommodate more exhibits and more children.

The museum was established to fill a void in cultural and arts education caused by budget cutbacks in elementary schools in the 1980s, said co-founder Liz Miramontes-Kennard. The museum provided a place where children could paint, act and learn about arts from around the world, she said. The concept flourished, as dozens of similar museums opened throughout California.

But the recent boom in commercial play centers for children--mostly in enclosed shopping malls--have cut into the number of visitors coming to the nonprofit museums, directors said.

Still, parents said they liked the hands-on nature of the children’s museum, a place where toddlers could touch without worrying about breaking something or finger-paint without worrying about making a mess.

“I don’t know where we’ll go now,” lamented Russell. “Where else can I bring (the kids) where they are nice and safe and still have a good time?”

Correspondent Sarah M. Brown contributed to this story.