The Chicago Academy of Sciences said Tuesday that it will close its Nature Museum, which has occupied temporary quarters in the North Pier entertainment complex since 1995, at the end of the month.
The museum, featuring exhibits on environmental sciences, has been at 445 E. Illinois St. while the academy awaits completion of its new, $20 million, 73,000-square-foot nature museum. Under construction on the northwest corner of Fullerton Parkway and Cannon Drive in Lincoln Park, it is scheduled to open in the spring of 1999.
“We were going to close the temporary museum space next spring, anyway,” said Kara Tourville, the museum’s marketing director, “so this just moves up the closure by a few months. The museum closing will not affect any of our educational outreach, lecture series and on-line programs whatsoever. Those will continue, as always.”
The academy’s board voted Tuesday morning to close the temporary facility, she said, because of the shifting use of the North Pier property.
MCL Cos., a Chicago real estate development firm, owns North Pier, the historic, converted warehouse facility along Ogden Slip. Earlier this year, MCL decided to begin converting space now used by the museum and various retail outlets to office space. It is renaming the complex River East Plaza.
“We located there (North Pier) because of existing traffic of people visiting the shops and entertainment venues there,” Tourville said, “but the changes now taking place there encouraged us to close the museum at the end of December.
“We feel this is a good situation for everyone, clearing the way for the owners and allowing us to shift our focus to putting our energies into finishing our new building.”
Founded in 1857, the academy runs the city’s oldest museum. From 1893 to 1995, it had occupied the Laflin Memorial Building at Clark Street and Armitage Avenue in Lincoln Park. The exquisite 39,000-square-foot Italianate building proved too small and unwieldy for modern museum exhibits and programs. It now houses the administrative offices for the Lincoln Park Zoo.
The new museum, designed by architect Ralph Johnson as a state-of-the-art nature center, is going up on a 12-acre site provided by the Chicago Park District.
The building will include an indoor butterfly haven, where visitors can stroll at any time during the year amid flowerbeds and butterflies. Outdoors, much of the grounds surrounding the museum will be incorporated as nature exhibits, featuring 300 trees and 10,000 plants commonly found in northern Illinois.
The new facility will be known as the Nature Museum. It is the only museum specializing in the natural history and ecology of the Midwest.
Besides the museum, the academy operates “Science Power Online,” a computer science program in public schools. It also trains teachers in science workshops and operates special programs for adults and children, including lectures, field trips and weekend workshops.
The academy, with offices at 2060 N. Clark St., also operates the International Center for the Advancement of Scientific Literacy, an internationally respected research organization.
Three full-time and three part-time employees will be laid off after the temporary museum is dismantled in January, Tourville said. Several other employees will be retained, she said, to create exhibits and programs and take them to area schools and organizations until the new museum opens.