Memorial Hall

When you face Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, you are transported to another time. The massive centerpiece of our nation's centennial celebration, whose gargoyles form the base for a signature dome on the Beaux Arts structure, lends allure to some beautiful acreage that long has been neglected. Of course, museums are all about other times and how they relate to our present. The Please Touch Museum's possibly seeking much-needed new space in that vastly under-utilized architectural treasure in West Philadelphia is grounded in logic.

Everywhere you looked, there were shoulder pads. And basic black. There were a lot of knits and gravity-defying hairdos in electric hues. And that was just the visitors who crowded into Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park yesterday for the second annual Philadelphia Dresses the World exhibit. Onlookers seemed as intent upon making a fashion statement as the 103 local designers who showed off their wares this weekend in the city-sponsored international apparel mart. "I wasn't sure what to wear to come here, and I spent some time thinking about it," said Renee Gould, 34, of Camden, who was wearing a multicolored cotton skirt and a matching jacket in a stylish longer length.

AS THE architect for the proposed Civil War museum in Memorial Hall, I strongly support Mark Alan Hughes'proposal in his March 11 column ("Win-Win for Memorial Hall"). He and I prefer that the Civil War museum be located in Memorial Hall and that a piece of land nearby be given to the Please Touch Museum to build a new building. Memorial Hall was built to honor soldiers who died in battle in both the Civil War and the War of Independence and should be preserved as such for posterity.

High atop Memorial Hall, Jim Montgomery ducked into a small door and entered a brightly lit world of glass and iron. Overhead was a web of crisscrossing struts and beams, and hundreds of glass panes making up a colossal dome. At his feet lay an inner dome, like a giant bubble, 85 feet above the Great Hall. Here was a Philadelphia landmark that most people have seen only from the outside, rising above the treetops, sometimes miles away as they drive on the Schuylkill Expressway.

Antiques dealers from around the nation will gather at Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park this weekend for the second annual Fall Antiques Show to benefit the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania. Collectors can expect to find a wide assortment of furniture, estate and antique jewelry, Oriental items, silver, fine art, African-American memorabilia and affordable collectibles. In other words, the event will have something for just about everyone. The show will run from 1 to 9 p.m. today, with a champagne reception from 6 to 9 in a room adjacent to the show.

IDON'T KNOW who stands to profit from the final destruction of Memorial Hall, but the Daily News suggestion of turning it into an indoor playground, serves neither the city nor the museum. I like the museum and have enjoyed the time spent there with my children. Nonetheless, it is a playground for preschoolers and frankly, Memorial Hall, the only remaining relic of the Centennial Exposition, deserves a better fate. This is where America celebrated its first 100 years, where the telephone became the seed for today's worldwide telecommunications network, where post-Civil War America celebrated itself on the verge of its coming industrial and economic greatness.

I LOVE THE Please Touch Museum. My two children have lived their whole lives within a stone's throw of the place, and my first child went to the museum almost every day until he was about three. They've both grown up with the staff and are in the background of more than their share of photos in the museum newsletter. Now that they're older, they visit rarely - but even these funky Center City 10- and 7-year-olds are eager for the new museum to open, having listened for years to the museum staff offer their exciting vision of an expanded and updated facility.

Tomorrow's Sunoco Welcome America! neighborhood arts festival in Parkside, cosponsored by the Daily News, promises live entertainment and participant activities both indoors and out. Entertainment includes five drill team performances, Will Newton & the E.T. Band, singer Ken Taylor, Bushfire Theater of the Performing Arts, CEC's jazz band, Gospel Unity Ward's AME Choir and Elder George & Rhythm Crusade Choir. The festival opens with a parade that starts at Belmont and Parkside avenues and ends at the Memorial Hall stage area.

OPEN ANY door of Memorial Hall and you expect to be hit with the image of Charles Dickens' creepy spinster Miss Havisham of "Great Expectations" sitting in the ruins. Chances are, you're more likely to be be hit with falling plaster and decaying walls, or drips of rain from a leaking ceiling. As symbols go, Memorial Hall is a brilliant mirror of the park system it represents: a magnificent gem neglected by the city for so long that it's now decrepit, decaying and dangerous.

From the outside, Memorial Hall in West Philadelphia has never lost the grand presence it had when it was built in the 19th century as part of the city's centennial commemoration of American independence. But the modern reality of Memorial Hall is that it's badly run down. Its trademark dome leaks. It houses a grim welter of city and park offices. An indoor swimming pool sits unused. For years, the Fairmount Park Commission and the city have been seeking a plan to use this glorious, historic space, and reverse its decay.

James E. Henry Jr., 75, a retired site director with the Philadelphia Recreation Department, died of pulmonary fibrosis on Friday, May 20, at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse in Center City. Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Henry graduated from West Philadelphia High School in 1954 and earned a swimming scholarship to what is now Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, where he majored in physical education and recreation from 1954 to 1956. He earned a bachelor's degree in human services from Antioch University in 1983.

1 National Constitution Center Celebration Tomorrow to Monday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., 525 Arch St. Free. "Memorials: How a Nation Remembers": Visitors can make memorial pins, flags, and wreathes at activity tables and sing American anthems at "Patriotic Karaoke. " 2 Franklin Square Tomorrow to Monday, noon to 3 p.m., at the square, 6th and Race streets, Old City. Free. Franklin Square will feature several activities for children, including face-painting and games.

Not much disturbs the red-bellied turtles slowly carrying on, as turtles do, around Centennial Lake. Wind puffs down George's Hill, rippling murky water, buffeting the crust of lily pads. A stately row of rehabilitated historic houses across Parkside Avenue stands watch over lonely pond and empty field. Half a mile to the east, gleaming Memorial Hall - now transformed into the home of the Please Touch Museum - rises above grassy parkland. Half a mile to the west sits the Mann Center for the Performing Arts.

If the new Please Touch Museum at Memorial Hall were a movie, it would be Fantasia. Classically highbrow and totally trippy. When the idea of moving Philadelphia's cozy children's museum to the neglected 19th-century art palace was proposed four years ago, it seemed counterintuitive, to say the least. Was the sprawling Beaux-Arts hall, dripping with putti and pilasters, really the sort of place you wanted to unleash a thousand or so sticky-fingered, screaming kids? Children's museums aren't exactly known for their subdued decor.

"Man, it's humongous. " That was my 8-year-old son's reaction as we pulled up to Memorial Hall. But for anyone fearing loss of intimacy with the Please Touch Museum's move this month from a tiny Center City rowhouse to the granite behemoth in Fairmount Park, behold a recent Saturday-morning scene in the lower level. At six tiny cribs, each stocked with fresh linens and a newborn doll, a group of toddlers tended their charges with great seriousness. Nearby, 4-year-olds gathered plastic oranges and hot dogs and rang them up on a tiny cash register, while others measured feet and sold shoes.

More than 30 years after starting life in a small corner of another museum, and after a difficult decade toddling around Philadelphia in search of bigger digs, the Please Touch Museum is home. On Saturday, the museum will throw open the doors to Memorial Hall, the hulking souvenir of the 1876 Centennial Exposition that Please Touch has renovated as part of an ambitious - and, as it turns out, challenging - $88 million campaign. With this move, Please Touch brings Philadelphia into the big leagues of the splashy, nationally ranked children's museums of Indianapolis, San Jose, Calif.

'Man, it's humongous. " That was my 8-year-old son's reaction as we pulled up to Memorial Hall. But for anyone fearing loss of intimacy with the Please Touch Museum's move this month from a tiny Center City rowhouse to the granite behemoth in Fairmount Park, behold a recent Saturday-morning scene in the lower level. At six tiny cribs, each stocked with fresh linens and a newborn doll, a group of toddlers tended their charges with great seriousness. Nearby, 4-year-olds gathered plastic oranges and hot dogs and rang them up on a tiny cash register, while others measured feet and sold shoes.

As carpenters pounded and renovators scrubbed, officials of the Please Touch Museum gathered in the soaring main lobby of Memorial Hall yesterday to announce the largest individual gift in the museum's three-decade history - $5 million from philanthropist Dorrance H. Hamilton. Standing before a loopy rendering of the torch and arm of the Statue of Liberty - serendipitously concocted from the city's junk by artist Leo Sewell - museum president Nancy Kolb said more than $72 million had now been raised in the museum's building and capital campaign, $16 million shy of the goal.