The World's Largest Children's Museum Is on Meridian Street
Five floors, a working dinosaur lab, a treehouse the size of a legend: the world's largest children's museum is exactly where you'd least expect it, and Indianapolis has the receipts.
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis makes a claim that sounds like a boast and verifies like a fact: it is the largest children's museum in the world — five floors and some 473,000 square feet on North Meridian Street, founded in 1925, receiving well over a million visitors a year. Indianapolis, a city outsiders underestimate on culture generally, keeps the category's global champion on a residential avenue.
The permanent exhibits explain the draw. Dinosphere wraps visitors in the Cretaceous — real fossils, a working paleontology lab behind glass where scientists prepare specimens found in the museum's own digs in Wyoming. Beyond Spaceship Earth reconstructs the International Space Station around the story of astronaut David Wolf. The Power of Children honors Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White — the Kokomo teenager whose fight against AIDS discrimination in the 1980s changed Indiana law and national attitudes — with a gravity unusual in children's museums and entirely characteristic of this one.
Outside, the Riley Children's Health Sports Legends Experience spreads the museum's philosophy across acres: miniature versions of the state's sporting cathedrals — a Colts football field, a Pacers court, a drag strip, a golf course scaled for children — attached to the world's largest treehouse of play structures and a museum of the state's sports heroes. Indianapolis's two civic religions, children and sports, share one campus without apology.
The museum's engine is its endowment and its membership: tens of thousands of member households use it the way other cities use a park — a standing resource, revisited monthly, through which generations of central Indiana children have passed on their way to being from here.
November brings the school groups on weekday mornings and the holiday machinery by month's end — the great slide in the atrium dressed for the season, the Jolly Days winter wonderland assembling. A century in, the museum's radical proposition stands: that children deserve the world's largest version of something, and that Indianapolis is the place that built it for them.
