Imagine Children's Museum
Imagine Children's Museum is a non-profit children's museum located in Everett, Washington, USA, near Seattle.
History
The museum was founded in 1991 as the Children's Museum of Snohomish County, as part of a countywide initiative to establish children-oriented places in Snohomish County by the county government's Children's Commission. It opened in 1993 at a storefront in nearby Marysville, but was forced to move to a temporary space in downtown Everett in 1995. The county government planned to locate the museum permanently at McCollum Park in Mill Creek, but plans fell through during the late 1990s, leading to a donation by the Schack family to fund a permanent museum in downtown Everett.The new $4.75 million museum, a former Everett Mutual Bank branch with of space, opened on October 17, 2004, and was renamed the Imagine Children's Museum. In its first year at the expanded location, the museum reported an attendance of 146,000, more than quadruple its annual attendance at its temporary locations. According to the museum's website, in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, it served more than 248,000 people through the museum and outreach programming.
In 2020, the museum announced plans for a four-story expansion that would add in the southern parking lot. Plans included a construction crane exhibit that would allow visitors inside the museum to step into the crane cab and pretend to be crane operators.
The $25 million expansion project ultimately added a three-story expansion of 33,000 square feet, doubling the museum's size. The LEED-certified building includes interactive, hands-on exhibit areas designed to promote children's active learning and healthy development through play. The expanded museum opened to members on August 19, 2022, and had a "soft opening" for the public on September 7, 2022. Its Grand Opening and Ribbon Cutting event took place on October 29, 2022.