I Always Wanted to Run Away to a Museum
Raise your hand if your life was somehow shaped, shifted, and molded by the book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler.1
Ever since I read it as a kid in the ‘80s, I always wanted to run away to a museum.2 It seemed like the most romantically exciting destination for a young nerd, living amongst the sarcophagi and in the shadows of dinosaur bones, napping inside an Inuit igloo, scuttling around the vast halls like a secret mouse.
(It would be the ultimate hooky day, now that I consider it!)
Museums have always felt magical to me, even if I couldn’t articulate why when I was growing up. And none were more so than the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, where I spent many hours on school field trips.
all photos copyright Casey Barber – please be respectful and don’t use without permission!
There was something so different and alluring about the vibe of the Natural History spaces compared to the Museum of Art wing — a richness and moodiness that the more clinical galleries of paintings, sculptures, and even period furniture couldn’t compete with.
The Carnegie exhibition halls were dim and mysterious with a particular lit-from-within glow coming from the wood-framed dioramas, the between-worlds feeling of being surrounded by permanent dusk or twilight. . .
. . . it was a full sensory experience that enveloped me and made me want to wander in its hushed presence forever. Yes, despite the underlying spine-itching creepiness of being surrounded by taxidermied animals.
Truly, if I could have run away to the museum, I would have set up residence in the Carnegie’s Hall of Botany. It’s one of the most strangely, perfectly soothing rooms ever and I often feel like I’m the only one who loves it this much.
The Hall of Botany is tucked in a second-floor corner within the Hall of North American Wildlife, around a curving wall that leads you into its sanctum. There, you’re swathed in restful ‘70s shades of mustard, bark, and moss and surrounded by serenely lit landscapes encircling the room like portals.
The fonts on the wall texts and labels have sadly been updated from their midcentury glory to a more post-millennial choice, but the Hall remains as gloriously calm as it has since I was young.
After the Carnegie’s famed dinosaur hall was upgraded in the mid-2000s and I mourned the loss of the iconic, though scientifically incorrect, T-rex mural and and my beloved Paleozoic-era trilobite dioramas (where did they go? Are they still in storage?), I realized I needed to shoot some of my favorite spaces in the museum for posterity.
The photos accompanying this essay are from 2018 and 2019 and try to encapsulate how I’m simultaneously awed and welcomed by these rooms and vignettes. (Especially some, like the Hillman Hall of Gems and Minerals, which feels like a set from Return to Oz.)
Maybe you’ll feel a shiver of recognition from your younger days at a museum, maybe you’ll be inspired to revisit the places like this that captivated you and and capture them visually for future memories. Because even if I can’t walk the halls of the Museum of Natural History anytime soon, I can always run away in my mind.
- I re-read the book periodically just to get that frisson of adventure once again. So if you haven’t done so in a while, do it! And learn more about the long life of this life-changing book from Smithsonian Magazine and the New York Public Library. ↩︎
- And yes, this phrase is an oblique reference to The Royal Tenenbaums, which itself does an homage to The Mixed-Up Files when Margot and Richie run away to the Public Archives. ↩︎
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