World of picture books comes to life at children’s museum
On a crisp Saturday morning, a former tin can factory in North Kansas City, Mo., thrummed with the sound of young people climbing, sliding, spinning, jumping, exploring and reading. Yes, reading.
If you think this is a silent activity, you haven’t spent time in a first grade classroom. And if you think all indoor destinations for young people are sticky, smelly, depressing hellholes, check your assumptions at the unmarked front door.
Welcome to the Rabbit Hole, a new, decade-in-the-making museum of children’s literature founded by the only people with the stamina for such a feat: former bookstore owners. Pete Cowdin and Deb Pettid are long-married artists who share the bullish determination of the Little Red Hen. They’ve transformed the hulking old building into a series of settings lifted straight from the pages of beloved picture books.
Here’s what the Rabbit Hole isn’t: a place with touch screens, a ball pit, inscrutable plaques, velvet ropes, a cloying soundtrack or adults in costumes. It doesn’t smell like graham crackers, apple juice or worse (yet). At $16 per person older than 2, it also isn’t cheap.
During opening weekend March 16, the museum was a hive of freckles and gaptoothed grins, with visitors ranging in age from newborn to well seasoned. Cries of “Look up here!” and “There’s a path we need to take!” and “There’s Good Dog Carl!” created a pleasant pandemonium. For every child galloping into the 30,000-squarefoot space, there was an adult hellbent on documenting the moment.
Did you ever have to make a shoe box diorama about your favorite book? If so, you might remember classmates who constructed move-in-ready minikingdoms kitted out with gingham curtains, clothespin people and actual pieces of spaghetti.
Cowdin, Pettid and their team are those students, all grown up.
The main floor of the Rabbit Hole consists of 40 bookthemed dioramas blown up to life-size and arranged, Ikea showroom-style, in a space the size of two hockey rinks. The one inspired by John Steptoe’s Uptown features a pressed-tin ceiling, a faux stained-glass window and a jukebox. In the great green room from Goodnight Moon, you can pick up an old-fashioned phone and hear the illustrator’s son reading the story. One fictional world blends into the next, allowing characters to rub shoulders in real life just as they do on a shelf.
Visitors slid down the pole in The Fire Cat, slithered into the gullet of the boa constrictor in Where the Sidewalk Ends and lounged in a faux bubble bath in Harry the Dirty Dog.
There are plenty of familiar faces — Madeline, Strega Nona, Babar — but just as many areas dedicated to worthy titles that don’t feature household names, including