Miami's Kitschy Little Science Museum Closed Last Week

The intimate, much loved, and kitschy little Miami Science Museum closed its doors over the weekend with a nostalgia-fueled party Friday night, after fifty five years of field trips, planetarium shows, hands-on sea life exhibits, and kids climbing all over everything. After so much time, the institution, having already been renamed the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, has matured and grown out of its Coconut Grove location and is preparing to move into brand new, state-of-the-art, and much bigger digs in Downtown Miami's Museum Park.

Over the years, the museum's highlights have included a giant statue of a sloth, a bicycle-riding skeleton, a giant world globe saved from the former Pan Am Seaplane Base (now City Hall) that has fascinatingly out-of-date place names (French Indochina, anyone?), underwater reefs, a stuffed Kodiak bear, and of course the planetarium, which came with the most high tech analog projector of its day when the planetarium was added on in 1967. That projector will be retired, and become an exhibit at the new location. Once it has been vacated (which should take a little while. Science museums have lots of stuff to move), ownership of the Coconut Grove building and site will eventually be transferred to Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.

· 1960s projector at Miami's planetarium will retire [Miami Herald]
· Miami bids farewell to Frost Museum of Science's old location [New Times]
· Frost Museum of Science coverage [Curbed Miami]
· Miami Science Museum coverage [Curbed Miami]
· Frost Museum of Science [miamisci]