The Westchester Children’s Museum is familiar with challenges — the first being its space on Playland boardwalk.
“Imagine an old, abandoned shower sitting dormant, filled with asbestos, not in good shape,” said Jeremy Scalchunes, the museum’s executive director, in describing the historic North Bathhouse the group started with.
Ten years later, those decrepit walls are restored and stocked with troves of hands-on activities and educational materials for children.
The museum celebrated its 10th birthday April 26 with an already sold-out day of free admission.
“ I look at the previous images of where we started versus where we are now,” said Byron McCray Miller, director of communications. “It’s a reminder that nothing is impossible.”
Born in 2001, the concept was long a “museum without walls,” as board member and founding member Corinne Zola described it. With a team of educators, volunteers, and other early childhood experts, the museum curated programming from across the county, meeting children at schools, libraries, and community centers, including the Playland Boardwalk.
After years of lobbying and ardent public support, the county proposed the bathhouse, out of use since 1950, as a permanent location. In 2016, the museum opened, occupying just 6,000 square feet in a room that is now an in-house café. After more renovation work, it quadrupled in size and now encompasses the bathhouse’s entire 24,000 square feet. It also features more ambitious, hands-on material for its patrons.
“I was always so optimistic about what could be accomplished here,” Zola said.
Take, for example, the museum’s cardboard cutter workbench station. There, kids use dull blades to carve up pieces of cardboard and construct their own artistic creations, giving them tactile materials to play with and offering a shop-class experience that is safe, but not completely neutered. This is an exhibit McCray Miller said is the result of collaborations with teachers, early educators, and focus groups to adapt to changing needs with hands-on learning.
In the museum’s Wind and Weather exhibit, children can play meteorologist, stand in front of a green screen and give the weather report, or learn about condensation and extreme weather events by examining an encased “mist tornado.”
“Thinking has changed,” Zola said of research around children’s playtime needs. “How do kids play? What kind of materials can they be using? What kind of safe risks can they be using?”
The museum is set to modernize its “toddler beach” area, where children up to three years old can play. Half of the $400,000 in funding has already been raised from a March cocktail benefit event, and a campaign to raise the final funds is set to launch at the end of the month. The museum hired a design firm, Learn’ique, based in Rye, to design the space. In 2025, the museum recorded an attendance of 150,000, six times the numbers of 2022, an increase they attribute to the need for local enrichment programming, as well as the space’s affordability and accessibility.
In a landscape where screen time and funding cuts to public schools dominate conversations surrounding education, the museum offers an alternative way to spend time.
“ You’ll see children are not very interested in screens when they’re here,” Scalchunes said. “They’re very quickly forgotten because of all the different manipulatives and exhibits and imaginative play. It’s essential for their mental health.”
Going forward, the museum’s goals include reaching atypical museum goers, like non-English speakers and those in low-income households (about one fifth of the museum’s yearly members are a part of a program that guarantees a 90 percent discount on entry for familes who qualify). The musuem also is expanding its services to kids who can’t get to Rye very easily, reviving their traveling program from decades ago in northern Westchester.
“It’s always been about critical thinking and problem solving,” Zola said. “Open play for kids so that they could take their own risks and lead the way.”
Photos courtesy of Westchester Children’s Museum
