Discovery Place to unveil planetarium, new attractions

Celebrating its 70th anniversary, Discovery Place is poised to announce Thursday a series of improvements – including a health laboratory and a new planetarium.

“Planetariums have come back in vogue,” says Catherine Wilson Horne, CEO of Discovery Place.

Equipment has been purchased to project sky shows, and the planetarium should be in use in early 2017. It will be in the Charlotte Nature Museum, one of Discovery Place’s four campuses, using a space that held the center’s original planetarium that installed in 1965 and decommissioned in the late 1980s.

Other innovations coming to Discovery Place and its satellites:

▪  A new website debuts Thursday at DiscoveryPlace.org with more imagery, video and science features, designed for easy viewing on mobile devices.

▪  Development of a health lab focusing on human health and medicine and a second laboratory dedicated to innovation and design thinking.

▪  A new branding and marketing strategy to unify the center’s four sites open to the public – the North Tryon Street museum, the nature museum beside Freedom Park and Discovery Place Kids satellites in Huntersville and Rockingham.

▪  An upgraded grocery market space is being installed at the Huntersville children’s center focusing on nutrition. Discovery Kids in Rockingham is beefing up outreach to schools in the Sandhills region.

▪  Signage on buildings will be changed to conform to a standard and cleaner Discovery Place logo. Charlotte Nature Museum will become Discovery Place Nature, the Tryon Street center will be known as Discovery Place Science and the children’s museums will continue to be called Discovery Place Kids.

▪ A new advertising campaign developed with the Charlotte creative agency Wray Ward pegged to curiosity will be rolled out with the tag line, “We Wonder. Do You?”

Growth in Charlotte

Discovery Place traces its roots to 1946, when a science teacher named Laura Owens persuaded prominent community leaders to open a nature center in a house at 315 North Cecil St.

It was a repository for animal specimens, rocks and minerals – the kinds of things Charlotte children could find in their own yards.

With money raised by the Junior League of Charlotte, the center moved to its present location in 1951 at 1658 Sterling Road and became Charlotte Nature Museum.

After the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite Sputnik in 1957, interest in science and technology surged. Charlotte Nature Museum outgrew its walls.

By the late 1970s, money was raised and appropriated to build one of the first science exhibition centers in the Southeast.

It was placed in a then-derelict block of North Tryon that the city was trying to infuse with development. “It was a bold move to put it here,” says Horne, “as a catalyst to help develop uptown.”

Discovery Place was radically different than museums of the day – it stressed hands-on learning, encouraging visitors to interact with exhibits.

Thousands come to see

Thousands turned out on Halloween 1981 for a walk-through inspection on the eve of Discovery Place’s opening.

“It was probably the only day in our history where you couldn’t touch anything,” says Debra Smul, vice president of marketing at Discovery Place.

“Up until that time, going to a museum meant walking with a docent,” she said. “This was hands-on and had a rainforest and an aquarium, all novel in the ‘80s.”

Over the years, the uptown museum added exhibition space, The Charlotte Observer IMAX Dome Theatre and a parking deck.

Struggles and success

Admissions peaked in the late 1990s, then began to fall back. Discovery Place’s exhibitions had fallen out of date.

It faced increasing competition from nearby cultural institutions drawn to the part of North Tryon that Discovery Place had rejuvenated, including a small uptown satellite branch of the Mint Museum of Craft + Design and the Tryon Center for Visual Art.

By 2001, president John Mackay – who had taken over only five months earlier without a detailed understanding of the center’s financial problems – cut 15 percent of staff to balance the center’s budget.

It took years to get the financial house in order, but Discovery Place persevered and began growing again.

In 2010, the center finished an 18-month, $32 million renovation with new interactive exhibits. Discovery Place Kids opened in 2010 in Huntersville and another such center was added in 2013 in Rockingham.

In 2014, a center opened behind Discovery Place to train teachers from both Carolinas in science and technology education. Called the Education Studio at the Bank of America STEM Center for Career Development, it serves educators from pre-K to 12th grade.

Growing demand

In its last fiscal year, which included the debut of the popular “Body Worlds” exhibition uptown, admissions were up 12 percent over all four campuses to 828,000. Discovery Place remains one of the leading attractions in the Carolinas and is the most-visited museum in Charlotte.

Measuring “dwell times” – the amount of time visitors spend engaged in various environments in Discovery Place – shows that the new laboratories should be a popular addition, says Horne.

Dwell time in the existing labs – where topics like physics, chemistry, life science and classifying artifacts – is about 30 to 45 minutes, two or three times the amount of time spent in a regular exhibit. In “Body Worlds,” the average stay was an hour.

“In the labs,” Horne says, “the magical thing that happens is to see families come in and work together.”

Horne says the mission of raising awareness about technology is key in society today.

“Science is about understanding where the future is taking us,” she says, “and our job is to help the public understand what that means in their lives.”

This story was originally published September 29, 2016 at 12:01 AM with the headline "Discovery Place to unveil planetarium, new attractions."