The Nook Is History, But Wally's Here

When I was a kid, the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA, was a cool, dark and mysterious place. As school kids, we were trotted through maybe once a year, herded around the diorama hall or stuffed into the theater for a concert, then fed a picnic lunch on the lawn and shipped back to school.      

    Now, it still is what it always was — a funny little small-city museum, founded in 1903 by Zenas Crane (of Crane & Co.) with a little bit of everything: history, geography, science and art. But it’s better, now; polished, spiffed up, filled with interactive activities and revolving art displays. The Little Cinema theater plays movies you won’t find elsewhere; the museum offers monthly programs for kids and adults, from Asian culture to a wine tasting to a performance of the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s “Cinderella.â€�

      In fact, says the museum’s promotional literature, more than 85,000 people visit annually, including 13,000 school children.

     But you don’t grow up without losing something. When I was  one of those kids, museum highlights included:

 The beloved “rock boothâ€� where you ducked behind a black curtain into a pitch-black space, shoving and giggling, and pushed a button to see minerals react to ultraviolet light.

  A scratchy, bad-sound, small-screen movie about prehistoric beasts, whose narration and visuals were always just out of synch.

  Lots of stuffed (as in taxidermy)  huge snakes (eww) under glass.

 Best of all: the circular, dark diorama room, with its score of back-lit,  small-scale scenes from around the world (The Northern Tundra, The Amazon Jungle, etc.). Nearby was a nook, pitch dark except for three lighted, life-size dioramas depicting “typicalâ€� Berkshire outdoor  scenes (my favorite was a bobcat perched on a snowy cliff, menacing a deer).

   In short, the museum was half joke, half delight (like most things in childhood).

   It seemed to deserve a return trip — as an adult.

   Well, it’s the same and not. Still plenty of taxidermed beasts, still the diorama room (gone is the life-sized nook) and still the funny little gift shop, which now carries expensive jewelry. It’s hard to get an exact history of the improvements; when I called to find out what happened to the dinosaur movie or the life-sized dioramas, a somewhat chagrined Sherrill Ingalls, director of marketing, said, “That was before my time.â€� Hmph.

   First, apparently, came the aquarium, sometime in the ’80s, located in the basement. This is a terrific addition of live (yes! live!) local and exotic fish, turtles and reptiles that includes a hands-on space where you can look at starfish and horseshoe crabs up close and a “Berkshires pondâ€� scene where you can push a button to be serenaded by bullfrogs.

   On the first floor, I’m sorry to say the mineral booth is gone (replaced by a far more efficient modular, no-curtain construction) as is the scratchy movie. But in their place are some terrific (fake) dinosaurs, one of which was being ridden by a delighted toddler when I was there. Hustling through the “Berkshire Birdâ€� room (same old stuffed birds behind glass, hated them then, don’t love them now) I stopped long enough to try my hand at the “identify these bird callsâ€� and failed miserably. But yes! The diorama room is still there, the gorilla in the Congo still lurching through the jungle, the anaconda still swinging from a tree in the Amazon and a herd of bison still thundering across the Plains.

    I wondered what the kids’ favorites are nowadays. Ingalls tells me the aquarium is No. 1, with the mummy (upstairs, who knew?) second, and Wally, the life-size stegosaurus out front, a close third. Wally, as it happens, was constructed for Dinoland Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair by a famous wildlife sculptor, Louis Paul Jonas. Who, as it turns out, is the creator of all those fabulous dioramas as well.

   About where I remember two North American Indians in native dress standing in a big glass case (I could be wrong — this doesn’t ring a bell with Ingalls) is now  a high-tech looking Vend-O-Mat, which dispenses snacks and beverages courtesy of buttons, levers, pulleys and cash. Ingalls tells me the Vend-O-Mat was installed in 1995, but will soon be demolished to make way for a new 3,000-square-foot addition, The Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, devoted to changing displays of innovations in science and the arts that have emerged from the Berkshires, slated to open next March. Before you snicker and say what innovations, let me mention Ted Shawn, Edith Wharton, the Shakers, the Lenox School of Jazz. To name a few. Anyway, I’m relieved to hear that snacks will still be available.

     Now that I’m a grown-up, I figure it’s time to go upstairs. Here I find various galleries offering a show on the art of wine bottle labels, photographs from the magazine Berkshire Living and a selection of paintings and ceramics that show the influence of Asian art on Dutch decorative arts. An Art of Food display includes lithographs from Jim Dine and Larry Rivers, an Ellsworth Kelly drawing and a Marsden Hartley oil.

   But the real surprise comes in “Alexander Calder: An American at Play,â€� which not only traces Calder’s career as a toy maker and displays any number of his whimsical wood and metal push-me pull-me toys, but informs me that the Berkshire Museum was the first museum in the world to purchase a Calder mobile (on display). It also offered him his first-ever architectural commission, for two air-driven mobiles installed on either side of the theater’s stage to mask the ventilation system. (The gal who runs the gift shop was kind enough to let me into the darkened theater and show them to me. When the theater had vented air, the mobiles moved, she explained. And now? “We have airconditioning.â€�)    

   Well. By this time I’m wondering why the whole world isn’t poking around the Berkshire Museum, looking for treats. And when I leave, buying a few bad-color photos of dioramas (“Elk, Rocky Mountainsâ€�) I feel like I’ve certainly gotten my money’s worth. Which, by the way, is $8.