While touring an industrial museum in Munich with his family in 1911, 8-year-old William Rosenwald couldn't get enough of the mining exhibit in that institution's basement.
William's father, Julius Rosenwald, then head of Sears Roebuck & Co., decided to bring a similar, hands-on museum to Chicago. That's why there's a coal mine in the wonder-packed Museum of Science and Industry, a once-crumbling building with a storied past.
Sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens had proclaimed the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 Columbian Exposition "the finest thing done since the Parthenon," which is saying something. But, like the rest of the "White City," the Palace never was intended to be permanent. After the exposition closed and all the other buildings were dismantled, the Field Museum occupied the Palace of Fine Arts structure and kept the plaster-faced brick building together with frequent repairs and the era's equivalent of duct tape. After the Field moved to Grant Park, the vacant, once magnificent building sagged into the soggy soil of Jackson Park.
Rosenwald pointed out that an interactive museum could give a purpose to the Palace. In 1926, the city passed a $5 million bond issue to restore the exterior to look exactly as it had in 1893. Some 350,000 square feet of Indiana limestone later, the Museum of Science and Industry opened in 1928.
Of the wonders within, the first and still among the most popular is "Old Ben #17," the re-creation of an Illinois coal mine. There's also the Pioneer Zephyr, the sleek, deco-style train that, in 1934, set a speed record for rail travel between Denver and Chicago. There's the U-505 German submarine that recently dove 72 feet into new underground quarters. The model train exhibit is both bigger and smaller; it has been expanded to 3,500 square feet but its trains have gone from O-gauge (where one inch of model equals 43 inches of real train) to the smaller HO-gauge (one inch equals 87 inches).
Anyone who was a Chicago-area schoolkid has memories of the walk-through heart, the whispering gallery and the chick-hatching exhibit.
The chicks struggle, all wet and squinty-eyed, out of their shells.
Welcome to Chicago.