America's Oldest Natural History Museum Goes Dark After 198 Years
Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences shut its doors for good this week, leaving 19 million specimens — and a fight over its future — behind.
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, the oldest natural history museum in the United States, has permanently closed its Philadelphia doors after nearly two centuries — a casualty of falling attendance and the financial strain of maintaining a 19-million-specimen collection inside a 150-year-old building.
The museum, founded as a scientific society in 1812 and opened to the public in 1828, held its last regular public hours on Sept. 27 and officially closed Sept. 30, according to FOX29 Philadelphia. Its building at 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, designed by James H. Windrim and occupied since 1876, will no longer be open to the public.
Why It Closed
Drexel University, which absorbed the Academy in 2011, said admission had never fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic even as operating costs kept climbing. University president Antonio Merlo and Academy board chair Suzanne Biemiller said in a joint statement that continuing to run the museum in its current building "would place increasing pressure on the resources required to safeguard the collections and sustain the research enterprise," per PhillyVoice.
"PAINFUL FOR STAFF AND DEEPLY DISAPPOINTING TO MANY."
— Drexel and Academy leadership, describing the decision to close.
The closure drew weeks of protest from Philadelphia residents, scientists and politicians who argued the 200-year-old institution — home to specimens collected by 19th-century naturalists and the dinosaur skeleton that gave Philadelphia its claim as a birthplace of American paleontology — deserved a rescue plan rather than a shutdown, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Academy president and CEO Scott Cooper is stepping down as part of the transition. Drexel says it remains committed to preserving the 19 million biological specimens, fossils and other research holdings and to eventually offering the public some new form of access to them, even without a standing museum.
No timeline has been set for what becomes of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway building itself, leaving open the possibility — however unlikely supporters' petitions make it feel — that part of the Academy's public face could one day reopen in a different form.