Glazer Children's Museum

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The museum carries on from Kid City, an outdoor miniature town beside the zoo that ran from 1989 to 2003 and drew more than 750,000 visitors before it closed. The Glazer Family Foundation gave five million dollars toward a replacement, and the building that carries their name opened on September 25, 2010, in downtown Tampa, between Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park and the Tampa Riverwalk, next door to the Tampa Museum of Art. It runs to about 53,000 square feet on two floors. The whole place is built around role play rather than reading labels. Children run a grocery store, a vet clinic, a bank, a fire truck, a cruise ship, a construction site and a television studio, and there is a water table area, a climbing structure that rises through the central space, and an art room. Most of it is aimed at children roughly one to ten years old, and it works better for the younger end of that range. Adults are expected to come along rather than wait outside. Weekday mornings bring school groups, so afternoons and weekends are usually easier. Allow two to three hours