Children S Museum

The group building the Baltimore's Children's Museum is exploring plans to make it the anchor for an even more ambitious development project: a children's center that would provide a wide range of services.Baltimore Children's Museum, Inc. the nonprofit group planning the center, recently chose a multidisciplinary team headed by Struever Bros., Eccles & Rouse of Baltimore to assess the economic feasibility of creating the museum and center.The site under study is the Brokerage at the Inner Harbor, a three-acre, 280,000-square-foot complex of shops, offices and parking space bounded by Baltimore, Water and Frederick streets and Market Place.

Thousands of children, from toddlers to 12-year-olds, did something yesterday that seems almost novel in the age of computers and digital games: They went outside and played. In the chilly air of the first Sunday of October, Rash Field at Baltimore's Inner Harbor became a sprawling playground. Over six hours, boys and girls skipped rope, jumped rope, hula-hooped, played with sticks and created works of sidewalk art with colorful chalk. They chased big, soapy bubbles created by a clown on stilts.

Not to worry, Port Discovery, Baltimore's new children's museum -- the second-largest of its kind in the country -- really will open next month, museum officials announced yesterday at a last-minute press conference.Speaking in the museum's cavernous atrium, where construction workers still toiled, Douglas L. Becker, chairman of the Port Discovery board and president of Sylvan Learning Systems, spoke optimistically of the $32 million museum's planned opening to the public on Dec. 29.Until now, the museum has maintained a low profile, leading to public skepticism that it would open at all. Additionally, the museum's public opening date was delayed three weeks to allow construction crew and staff to put the finishing touches on the building and to make sure all exhibitions were in operating order.

With drums, bells and other instruments, children were raising the roof Sunday at Port Discovery in Baltimore, as part of the 10th annual "I Have A Dream Weekend" festivities honoring the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. On Day 2 of the three-day celebration, scores of children sat in a large studio of the children's museum, beating djembe West African drums while others shook cowbells and whacked tambourines. They tried to keep up with Jonathan Murray, drum circle facilitator, and his partner, Daveed Korup, who built the African rhythms to a crescendo as loud as an Eastern Shore summer thunderstorm.

In its brief heyday in the late 1980s, Baltimore's Fishmarket drew nightly crowds of yuppie twenty-somethings who wanted to dance to the beat of local bands.Now the city hopes to capitalize on a new era. If the mayor and a private, nonprofit development corporation have their way, the settled couples of the 1990s will return to the Fishmarket, this time with their children in tow.The city hopes to revive the failed nightclub complex as a children's museum, the anchor of a $30 million National Children's Center planned for Market Place near the Inner Harbor.

A hoard of coins and bank notes lay unnoticed for years in a safe at the Cloisters, the hilltop castle in Brooklandville that became a Baltimore-owned children's museum.Now, the city expects the find to pay off. Christie's, a New York auction house, has put a high value on the collection and will sell it Sept. 13 to benefit the museum."I think $350,000 is a perfectly reasonable expectation," said James Lamb, director of Christie's coin department. "Perhaps we can come up with a bit more."The old U.S. coins and notes were found in a safe at the Cloisters by city employees during the conversion of the mansion into a museum in 1977, five years after its owner's death.

Amelia Dudley's dream came true shortly after 1 p.m. #F yesterday.That's when she finally climbed into the sphere at the top of KidWorks, the three-story-high jungle gym at the center of Port Discovery, the $32 million children's museum that opened in downtown Baltimore."

The Board of Estimates yesterday approved the city's $5 million purchase of The Brokerage, a perennially ailing office and retail complex on Market Place downtown, and moving the Cloisters Children's Museum there from its city-owned site in Baltimore County."

Port Discovery, the $29 million downtown Baltimore children's museum expected to open next year, got a boost yesterday when the state Board of Public Works approved a $1.5 million grant for development and design.The grant brings to more than $14 million the amount raised toward the cost of the museum, including corporate donations and state and city investments totaling more than $6.5 million.Rouse Co. is development manager and Walt Disney Imagineering, the corporate giant's design arm, is designing and building the high-tech exhibits.

The Board of Estimates yesterday approved the city's $5 million purchase of The Brokerage, a perennially ailing office and retail complex on Market Place downtown, and moving the Cloisters Children's Museum there from its city-owned site in Baltimore County."

The Smoke City has come a long way since its origins as the industrial giant of the world. Trying to reverse a hazy legacy that led writer James Parton in 1868 to describe it as "hell with the lid taken off," Pittsburgh has joined the green, eco-friendly movement. The city hosts visitors in the world's largest green-certified convention center, where lights are recycled and water is reclaimed. It's also known for outdoor retreats, historical sites, museums, art galleries and zoos. 1 Go play at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.

Bryan and Missy Meyers planned their vacation to Northern Virginia around a trip to Baltimore's Port Discovery - a favorite spot of their young daughters before the family moved to Reno, Nev. With a late flight Tuesday, the Meyers family arrived at 11:30 a.m. only to learn that the children's museum would close in an hour and a half. The reason: Lots of children and no water pressure make for very messy bathrooms. And after seeing the toilets brimming with discolored, soppy toilet paper, Missy Meyers conceded the point.

From an early age, kids are fascinated by water. A new exhibit at Port Discovery Children's Museum capitalizes on that fascination. Wonders of Water is the name of the $400,000 exhibit, the first permanent one added to the museum since it opened in December 1998. The new aquatic playground on the museum's third level lets kids interact with water in a variety of ways. They can pump it, squirt it, make giant bubbles with it, play music with it, float boats on it -- just about anything short of bathing in it. And that appeals to kids' natural interest in all things liquid.

Nail biting, keeping a messy desk and hitting a little brother were among the bad habits written on strips of paper, then stuffed into an effigy of an old man on Wednesday. Girls ages six to 11 participating in New Year's Around the World at the Chesapeake Children's Museum in Annapolis then carried the old man, stuffed with their faults and pieces of cloth, as though they were taking him to the market to light on fire, as is a tradition in Ecuador. "Now you don't have to think about your faults anymore," said Renee Spears, a museum volunteer.

Harford County: Pylesville North Harford school water tests clean The water at North Harford Middle School came back clean in its first test since showing traces of fecal coliform earlier this month. Twelve samples were taken from the Pylesville school's water, which has been shut off since a pipe was broken during construction in the summer. A spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment said 12 more samples were to be taken yesterday, with the results coming in over the weekend.

Financially struggling Port Discovery received debt relief yesterday from city officials who agreed to allow the downtown children's museum to delay repaying $4 million in loans that were coming due in December. The city's five-member Board of Estimates unanimously approved a request from the Baltimore Development Corp. to modify its loan agreement with Port Discovery's nonprofit operating company. The deal allows the Baltimore Children's Museum Inc. to repay the interest-free loans by Dec. 31, 2009, instead of at the end of this year, allowing its executives time to continue on a newly implemented business plan aimed at improving Port Discovery's operations.

The city's new Children's Museum has lured a tenant guaranteed to be a bona fide hit with its child customers: McDonald's. The city Board of Estimates approved yesterday a lease between the fast-food restaurant chain and Port Discovery, the new $32 million interactive children's museum at Market Place. Under the lease, McDonald's Corp. will rent 4,752 square feet for $60,000 a year. In addition, McDonald's will give the museum 4 percent of its profits over $1.25 million annually and 2 percent of profits under that.

The international art world will cast a glance at Baltimore County next week as the remaining fine and decorative-art antiques from the vast Cloisters Collection go on the auction block at the State Fairgrounds in Timonium.The March 25 sale of items from the eclectic collection of the late Sumner A. and G. Dudrea Parker will be the fourth held locally this year.The couple amassed the Continental and American antiques, which date from the 17th to the 19th centuries, during their annual European trips.

NEXT WEEK IN LIVE This year's holiday movie season gives viewers more hope and less to cry about ... Checking out the fresh produce at four markets just north of the Maryland line. COMING UP The suit-wearing, pump-purchasing class in Washington does have some creativity in its midst after all. It'll be displayed in spades this week when Artomatic opens. The annual event is a kind of Trading Spaces for artists. A horde of them (more than 1,000) take over an underused office building - this time the site of the old National Children's Museum - and paint it, install art in it and generally turn it into their own studio/fun house.

If you have a kid who loves music, Port Discovery has just the exhibit for your little fan. Opening Saturday and running through Jan. 9 at the downtown children's museum is Making America's Music: Rhythm, Roots and Rhyme, a new traveling exhibit celebrating the history, diversity and joy of American music. The exhibit, created by the Boston Children's Museum and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, promotes an appreciation of music by kids and encourages them to participate in music-making, says Michelle Winner, director of marketing at Port Discovery.