History
The museum was founded in 1983. It opened its first exhibit in a 4,000 square feet (370 m2) warehouse in 21 June 1986. The museum boasted three permanent galleries: the Grain Elevator and Train, Making Sense and The Big Top, and drew 65,000 visitors the first year. The museum expanded at the location in 1988, doubling its space.
In 1989 plans were initiated to move the museum to a new space. In 1994, after a $4 million capital campaign, the museum moved to its permanent home at the former Kinsmen Building (also known as the Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway Repair Shop or the CNR Bridges and Structures Building) in The Forks. The building at the Forks location is the oldest surviving train repair facility in Manitoba. Constructed in 1889 by the Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway Company, the building originally included a machine and blacksmith shop, engine house and a ten-stall roundhouse and turntable. Designed by John Woodman, it was typical example of a late nineteenth-century industrial building and was formally recognized as a Provincial Heritage Site on 22 March 1995.
Following a $10M capital campaign in 2010 and 2011 which included the development of 12 new permanent galleries, a renovated Arts & Exhibition Centre, and the Buhler Welcome Centre addition, the Children's Museum reopened to the public in celebration of its 25th birthday on 4 June 2011. The 12 galleries were designed as separate structures so that if one is under repair or construction, it does not affect the other galleries. The galleries were designed by Montreal's Toboggan Design. The 2011 renovation included the addition of a new 3,500 square feet (330 m2) Welcome Centre, that includes a new admissions desk, museum shop and lunch room.
The majority of the funding for the renovations came from the federal government ($2.5 million under Canadian Heritage’s Canada Cultural Spaces Fund and $1.25 million under Infrastructure Canada’s Infrastructure Stimulus Fund), the provincial government ($1.25 million) and the City of Winnipeg ($446,000). The rest of the funding came from private donors, including philanthropists John and Bonnie Buhler ($800,000), as well as other fundraising activities.
Read more about this topic: Manitoba Children's Museum
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)