LINCOLN PARK — The Notebaert Nature Museum might be a relatively new addition along the city's lakefront, but it reminds visitors of its origins as the Chicago Academy of Sciences by offering free admission to Illinois residents this week.
The weeklong bash offers free admission all this week, then climaxes Saturday with a 160th birthday party as it lays claim to being the city's oldest museum. Along the way, it will hold daily scavenger hunts and 2 p.m. butterfly releases in the Butterfly Haven.
And on Thursday it will throw open the vault to put some of its rarely seen specimens on display, including a roseate spoonbill and a Cooper's hawk, just two of the 390,000 pieces in its collection. That event will run from 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
Opened at 2430 N. Cannon Drive in 1999, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum grew out of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, formed in 1857 as not just the first museum in the city but the first in what was then considered "the West."
Chartered in 1865, it opened a museum at Wabash Avenue and Van Buren Street, but it was lost along with all the exhibits, collections and library in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. It rebuilt, but lost that building in the financial downturn of the 1880s before constructing the Laflin Memorial Building in Lincoln Park in 1894 in what became a landmark agreement with the Chicago Park District that set the stage for other museums to be on parkland.
It thrived there for 100 years, although not always as a museum, instead devoting itself to research and education. That included teacher training and a leading role in the nascent environmental movement, as well as the origins of the Chicago Peregrine Release and Restoration Project later on in the '80s under Mary Hennen, a volunteer at the academy before she moved on to the Field Museum, where she remains assistant collections manager.
The Laflin Building, 2001 N. Clark St., continues to house academy administrative offices, although it's now considered the main headquarters of the Lincoln Park Zoo.
The Notebaert Nature Museum will offer free admission from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday. It will charge the usual admission — $9 for adults, $7 for students and seniors, $6 for kids 3-12 — for the 160th birthday celebration Saturday, which will begin with an hourlong special event for museum members only at 10 a.m.
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