‘Just amazing’: KC’s Rabbit hOle, a giant interactive children’s museum, opens at last
If the creation of The Rabbit hOle were itself a book, it could be an epic.
Eight years after the idea of creating an interactive museum was announced, where kids can stroll “Where the Sidewalk Ends” or walk through the mouth of the monster in the “The Zabajaba Jungle,” the doors to the museum opened Tuesday in North Kansas City. It’s touted as the only museum of its kind in the United States.
The building at 919 E. 14th Ave. — a four-story, 150,000-square-foot former warehouse — might seem incongruous for housing children’s storybook dreams. Inside, its bottom and first floors — the extent of the museum until it expands upward — contain a labyrinth of 45 immersive exhibits, each based on a different storybook.
“I will say that it is more beautiful than Debbie and I ever imagined,” said Pete Cowdin, who with his wife and business partner, Debbie Pettid, conjured the idea of the museum in 2015. In March 2016, the pair closed the doors of their popular children’s bookstore, the Reading Reptile, a fixture in Brookside since 1988, to work on the museum in earnest.
They began the nonprofit Rabbit Hole KC, eventually raising $20 million that included a major gift from John Sherman, the principal owner of the Kansas City Royals, and his wife, Marny Sherman, who is a member of the museum’s board. Their gift allowed the $2 million purchase of the warehouse in 2018.
“I tell people all the time,” Cowdin said, “if all we do is create a beautiful place for children, then we’ve done enough. But we’re going that next step where we’re going to create a world of readers for generations.”
Before the entrance on 14th Street opened at 10 a.m., a line of 50 people waited outside. “Welcome,” Cowdin said, his arms spread wide. “Don’t be shy,” Pettid said.
Rabbit hOle’s full-time staff includes two dozen artists and exhibit fabricators. Once tickets are purchased, visitors descend stairs of rock, embedded with petrified books etched with letters, and into an ornate grotto — a winding cave — said to be home of Rabbit hOle’s own fictional character, Fox Rabbit, with the magical ability to immerse children into the stories they love.
The dark passageway is illuminated in blue by the swirling roots of a large blue tree that is Fox Rabbit’s home. The museum eventually hopes for the tree trunk to extend up through all four floors and break through the roof.
Once through the rabbit hole, visitors enter the world of storybooks. The blue-and-yellow striped baby dragon from “My Father’s Dragon” spins in a circle above the lily-pad forest from the story “Frog and Toad.” Wave to the motion-activated monkeys seated in the trees where the mustachioed man from “Caps for Sale” sits with 15 caps stacked on his head, and the monkeys, who have pilfered some of the caps, wave back.
Four Bengal tigers from the book “Sam and the Tigers,” in which the tigers run so fast they turn to butter, are recreated as a tiny carousel (It wasn’t running Tuesday, but soon will). The mouse and cockroach, the lead figures in the Puerto Rican folktale “Perez and Martina,” stand 6 feet tall.
If you peek inside the belly of the bear from “I Want My Hat Back,” you can see if he swallowed the hat thief … or maybe not. Nearly every exhibit includes some aspect of climbing or crawling. On the wall of every exhibit sits a rack of multiple copies of the book for kids to pick up, sit and read.
On Tuesday, Nathan and Maggie Vallette of Prairie Village were the first visitors with children to enter the museum. Mabel, soon to turn 8, was there, with Walter, 5.
“This is our spring break trip,” said Maggie Vallette, who is a librarian at Tomahawk Elementary School. She said she emailed friends and parents alerting them that the museum was opening. “We have been very excited for this,” she said. Her husband, Nathan, carried their son George, about to turn 1 year old.
Nearby, Rita Hillier’s daughters, Lucia, 7, and Madeline, 4, were coming down the stairs from seeing the baby dragon. Familiar with the Reading Reptile, Hillier said that she’s long been anticipating the museum opening.
“It has been worth the wait,” she said. “This place is magnificent. It was hard to know what to expect. I was following along with their posts and articles, keeping up with it. But this is just amazing.”
Lucia’s favorite at that point: “I liked that the monkeys were waving,” she said.
All the exhibits represent award-winning books from the United States. Thus there is no Winnie-the-Pooh or fellow Brits such as the Velveteen Rabbit or the White Rabbit from “Alice in Wonderland.” Dr. Seuss, although an American, is also not represented, as the characters are already a highly protected and popular brand.
Putting the museum together was no easy task.
Because of their decades at Reading Reptile and an annual LitFestKC, Cowdin and Pettid had come to know dozens of famous children’s authors. Before ever building the exhibits, Cowdin first needed to approach each of the major children’s publishing houses to ask not not for money, but for the pledge to allow use of copyrighted images and characters. In some cases, he gained permission directly from the authors or their heirs.
In many ways, Tuesday was considered a soft opening, tied to the eight-year anniversary of the closing of Reading Reptile. Some aspects of the museum are not finished, such as a cafe expected to be finished by Saturday, April 27, in time for a special grand opening celebration.
Cowdin emphasized that the plan is for the Rabbit hOle to be ever-evolving and growing, with four floors to fill, adding exhibits over time.
At the end of the museum there is a children’s bookstore and one final exhibit: the big green room from “Goodnight Moon,” where children and their parents, with their shoes off, can sit and read in the big chair near a crackling fire.
“We’re trying to create with the Rabbit hOle living culture around children’s literature,” Cowdin said. “There isn’t a place anywhere like this where you can walk into stories, where you can share those stories with your family, where you can sit down and read a book and you can learn more about the 100-year history of children’s literature …
“We can also bring them closer to the magic of books in a way that they might not expect.”
Tickets to the museum are $16. Children under age 2 are free. Yearly membership for a family of a four, allowing unlimited entry, is $200. Yearly membership for families with children receiving free-or-reduced lunch or with an EBT card is $25.
This story was originally published March 12, 2024 at 2:02 PM.
