A Hundred Thousand Dead Things on Montgomery Avenue

I ran past a weird old building near Temple for two years without going in. It is the Wagner Free Institute of Science: over 100,000 specimens, and free since 1855.

The Wagner Free Institute of Science, a pale yellow Victorian building with tall arched windows behind street trees on a sunny day

When I lived in North Philly, near Ridge and Sedgley, my runs almost always went west, toward Fairmount Park. Occasionally I ran east instead, to Temple's track. On one of those rare east runs I noticed a weird old building a couple of blocks from the Bank of America on Temple's campus, near the Qdoba. I never actually went in during my runs, cause I was, well, focused on running.

Earlier this summer, I finally went in, two years after I moved out of North Philly. Turns out it is a cool tiny museum with a bunch of animal bones and fossils in it. It is called the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and it has been there since 1865!

It's a tiny two-story museum. It's not the majestic neoclassic structure of the PMA or BFI. Instead it looks like a museum Sherlock Holmes would have visited in Victorian England. Dark wooden panels, and glass that's getting wavy with age. There are tons of meticulously labeled specimens, from seashells, to animal bones, to insects, to some leaves and other fauna. The Institute says the collection holds over 100,000 specimens. Oh, and it's been completely free since inception, it's literally in its name!

William Wagner, a Philadelphia merchant and "gentleman scientist" (aka dude with money who had weird science hobbies), began giving free science lectures at his home in the early 1850s, punctuating them with specimens he had collected since childhood. He even used to work for Stephen Girard, the banking magnate who founded and endowed Girard College. Anyways, by 1855, his lectures had grown popular and his collection had outgrown his house, so the Wagner Free Institute was formally incorporated that year. Construction on the building began in 1859 and it opened to the public in 1865, designed by John McArthur, Jr., the same guy who subsequently designed City Hall.

This is just yet another example of cool underlooked things to do in Philly, often completely free and unnoticed. This one's particularly pertinent given the recent shutdown of the Academy of Natural Sciences, which I wrote about here.