Press

The Wall Street Journal

The Children’s Museum of Manhattan will open a permanent exhibition in an East Harlem public-housing project in what officials hope can become a national model.

A $565,000 federal grant, awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will fund a 2,000-square-foot installation in the James Weldon Johnson Houses that will focus on health and literacy and include 25 interactive stations, as well as ongoing programming. It’s slated to open in 2013.

Museum experts said the collaboration between the New York City Housing Authority and the Upper West Side institution signals a shift in the role of children’s museums from cultural destinations to centers of social outreach and even activism.

“I think the children’s museum is at the forefront of the changing role that museums are playing in the 21st century,” said Susan Hildreth, director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. She called the public-housing program “a really neat model that we hope can be replicated in other parts of the country.”

For decades, children’s museums have gone beyond mini-kitchens and Play-Doh stations to offer educational programming, free tickets to underprivileged visitors and even tutoring. But in recent years, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan has cultivated relationships with federal and local governments to develop national curricula around health issues and worked on pilot programs from New Orleans to the South Bronx.

“CMOM is absolutely at the cutting edge,” said Janet Rice Elman, executive director of the Association of Children’s Museums. The public-housing project “meets families where they are,” she said. “That is very different.”

The Children’s Museum of Manhattan has sometimes been overshadowed in the minds of local parents by the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, which completed an $80 million renovation in 2008. That expansion, designed by Rafael Viñoly, doubled the museum’s size to more than 100,000 square feet.

And it will soon have more competition: On Saturday, the Children’s Museum of the Arts will open a new 10,000-square-foot space in SoHo that triples its previous size. In November, the New-York Historical Society will open the $5 million, 4,000-square-foot DiMenna Children’s History Museum in the basement of its current building.

Officials at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, which is about 38,000 square feet, said they, too, are looking to expand dramatically within the next four years. Despite the sometimes-cramped space, CMOM still boasts the largest crowds: In 2010, the museum welcomed 400,000 visitors, officials said—compared with 250,000 visitors reported by the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.

Still, spurred in part by their space constraints, museum officials said they turned their eyes to the surrounding communities.

“Our strategic plan was to identify the most pressing needs for children and families in our city,” said the museum’s executive director, Andrew Ackerman.

Although outreach efforts have “flowered” in the past five to seven years, he said, the approach is consistent with the museum’s original mission, when the institution took up no more than half a floor and shared space with a downtown firehouse: to bring arts to public schools.

Today, visitors mainly “judge the museum just by what they see when they walk through the door, which is good—really good,” said honorary chairwoman Laurie Tisch, whose foundation has provided nearly $1.2 million in funding since 2008. “But that’s not even close to where all the funds are going.”

CMOM is working with the National Institutes of Health to adapt its obesity-prevention curriculum for young children and is testing it in the South Bronx and New Orleans; it’s working with the city Administration for Children’s Services and the United Way of New York City to develop nutrition policies and training at eight Head Start locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan and has joined with the City University of New York to train home-based child-care providers.

“We fill in these gaps for people in our society who are now being asked to do more than they’ve ever been asked to do but aren’t trained for it,” Mr. Ackerman said.

That kind of outreach attracted NYCHA Chairman John Rhea when he wanted to bring museum-quality exhibitions into public housing. “We felt strongly that this was an organization that had a long track record investing in New York and working with low-income families,” he said.

Forging partnerships with a network of government entities is a “unique opportunity for our field,” Ms. Elman said. “I think they’re really setting the stage and laying the groundwork for children’s museums to become even more deeply embedded into their communities.”

By SOPHIA HOLLANDER