The National Children’s Museum is reopening to the public on September 2, after an 18 month closure. It will be open Thursday through Sunday with two timed sessions each day.
The museum, which opened in 1974, has had a rocky go at its new location on Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest; it closed its prior home at National Harbor in 2015. There was a soft-opening of the current building’s main concourse in late February 2020, but that was soon shuttered in response to the pandemic.
Longtime Washingtonians will be presented with a very different children’s museum than the one they grew up with, which starred tortilla-making classes and a goat named Rosie. The new iteration combines high-tech installations with old-school play areas. Kids can practice coding on cloud-like fiberglass spheres , learn about magnetic fields with a baseball installation featuring Nats players, and pretend they’re with Spongebob in Bikini Bottom through an augmented reality experience.
Tickets will be available to members on August 14, and will open to the general public on August 16 for $15.95. Reservations are required for all visits, which will fall into two time slots: 9:30 AM to 12:30 PM and 1:30 PM to 4:30 PM. Masks will be required for all visitors ages 2 and up, and all museum staff will be vaccinated.
The National Children’s Museum, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW.
Jane is a Chicago transplant who now calls Cleveland Park her home. Before joining Washingtonian, she wrote for Smithsonian Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she studied journalism and opera.
