Fairmount Park might not bring the built-in visitorship that Please Touch would have had in an enormous shopping mall on Penn's Landing, the originally envisioned site. It lacks the glassine waterfront and glassy skyline of the Boston Children's Museum. Its curb appeal is monochromatic and conservative next to the 8.1 million canary-yellow exterior tiles and environmental correctness of Rafael Viñoly's recent expansion of the Brooklyn Children's Museum.
But it is infused with something decidedly Philadelphia: history and its more solicitous cousin, nostalgia. Children older than Please Touch's traditional constituency (ages 2 to 7) will find exhibits aimed at them, including displays about the 1876 Centennial and a sprawling model of Fairmount Park as it appeared for that early world's fair.
Parents for whom childhood in Philadelphia fell between the 1960s and the early '90s might thrill to the set from Captain Noah and His Magical Ark, the popular local TV show, or, for a slightly older set, the monorail from the John Wanamaker toy department. Both have found a new context in Please Touch (though the monorail doesn't actually run). It's clear that if Philadelphia is the capital of the nostalgia belt, Memorial Hall is its new statehouse.
Not that children are neglected. The new Please Touch experience - its architecture by Kise, Straw & Kolodner and museum exhibits by vice president Willard Whitson - is a mix of old favorites such as the toddler-size SEPTA bus that children love to pretend to drive, and spectacular new sections where visitors can go down a dark rabbit hole with Alice in Wonderland, take flight in a miniature plane, or construct a working dam.
