When I was a kid, I loved the Liberty Science Center.
My parents took my sister and me there several times, and every time, I was bowled over by the place - the exhibits were often the same, but the sheer mass of the place, coupled with it's location, always overwhelmed me. My personal favorite thing to see was the giant expanding globe that hung in the middle of the Center, expanding and collapsing. I used to dream about having one that size in my bedroom.
About four years ago, my mother, sister, niece and I visited the Center, but it was almost completely boarded up, due to massive renovations that were about to take place. Half the exhibits were boxed up, and I looked forward to seeing it in two years, when it was promised to be bigger and better than ever.
I didn't get there in two years, obviously, but I got there today. And I was so excited to see it again, like visiting an old friend.
The question is, what has changed more - the place, or me?
Let me step back a second and say that more than anything, I wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid. That dream was squelched by my complete inability to handle math, but science has remained an interest of mine, and I love museums. So I wasn't walking in with the mindset of "Man, this is a kid's museum," or "Pft. Science. We should have gone to the movies."
Tickets, for admission to the museum, and an IMAX film, were $24. That's not unreasonable, since tickets to (what are billed as, but really aren't) IMAX films at the movie theater are close to $15. The entrance and ticket area are now on the front of the building, rather than the right side, along with the new, much larger gift shop. It's very large, very open, and very sleek, and the museum seemed to invest a lot of money in IKEA furniture and fixtures.
That sleek metallic look runs throughout the whole place, giving it a whole different feel. I used to find the place quite homey, but today, I felt like I was almost in a transportation terminal at points. I also found that the building space was VERY poorly used, with a lot of open, unused areas and exhibits spread out, instead of leading into each other, as they previously had.
We visited exhibits about the Hudson bay, with live sea creatures, another exhibit with live animals called "Eat or be eaten", an exhibit about bacteria and viruses, an exhibit about energy, and an exhibit about food. There were also exhibits about skyscrapers and communication, and a very interactive room full of things to play with, but we skipped those three, and here's why:
Children.
The LSC has always been a popular spot for class trips and summer camps, and I imagine they give great group rates. But the day of our visit, there had to be 20 different camps there, all made up of very young children, running, screaming, banging on things, pushing things over, and making such a cacophony of noise, that my boyfriend and I had to yell in most rooms to make ourselves heard (all that sleek metal I talked about before didn't do much in the way of stifling noise, either.) The interactive room was mayhem, simply put. We didn't even go in.
We couldn't get near most of the exhibits, because there were crowds of kids around them, and the ones I did get near that were interactive, were broken, from too much button pushing. I got pushed out of the way about twice, and when you're an adult, you can't give attitude to an unsupervised six year old. Finally, the staff running these exhibits were dead eyed like I had never seen before. This is ultimately what kept me from complaining about paying $24 a person to look at a museum full of broken stuff.
But enough of the negativity - the IMAX theater, as old as it is, is still awesome.
We saw "Hubble", which was about 40 minutes long, and told the story of the last repair mission to the telescope in 2009, and showed a lot of incredible images captures by the telescope of nebulas in the far reaches of space. It was really beautiful.
The cafeteria food didn't suck, and wasn't too overpriced - $25 for a personal pan pizza, a large salad from the salad bar, with all sorts of interesting things on it, a pulled pork sandwich, and two sodas. We got astronaut ice cream from the gift shop, and put quarters into the viewfinders out on the museum balcony, and peered over the Hudson into NYC, like I do every visit.
We only stayed about 2 hours total. The way out, I really wondered if I had outgrown the place, and was so found of it because my initial impression from the POV of an 8-year-old has remained untouched. Or, if I wanted to love it, but it had changed into something different, and ultimately, tired, despite it's massive face lift.
I said to my boyfriend that this would probably be my last time there. But the more I thought about it, if in the future I had a child, I'd want them to see it too, because they might see what I saw when I was their age. And I wondered if when I was running all over the place as a kid, looking at everything, my parents were thinking "God, I can't wait to get out of here." Maybe it really isn't a place for adults. And, like my boyfriend suggested, how much of their admission comes from adults, like us, coming back, trying to relive their childhood?
Ultimately, the LSC will always have a warm piece of my heart. And despite a few crappy experiences there, I'll probably keep going back, because even with all the changes, it feels so familiar.
And maybe someday I'll have the means to build a room big enough to hold that globe.
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