July 25, 2024 6:49 AM EDT

Remember those childhood fantasies of stepping into the wondrous world of a favorite book? Now you can live them. The immersive new children’s museum, The Rabbit hOle, opened this spring in a century-old warehouse. Pete Cowdin and Deb Pettid, the longtime owners of the beloved former local bookstore the Reading Reptile, spent nearly a decade developing this labor of love, working with authors and illustrators to feature licensed content. Like Alice in Wonderland, visitors go down the rabbit hole (quite literally into a “hole” of winding tunnels and caves), tumbling into classic and contemporary storybooks and meeting life-size characters such as the playful baby dragon from Ruth Stiles Gannett’s My Father’s Dragon and the peddler balancing a tier of caps amid a treeful of mischievous monkeys in Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale. What really sets the space apart is its multisensory, tactical design, created by an in-house team of artists. Kids can crawl, hop, jump, slide, pick up an old-school phone and hear a story, and, of course, curl up with a good book. It’s this setting that sparks the real magic—when a child can pad into the softly lit Goodnight Moon green room, with its floating red balloon and yellow rocking chair, and softly whisper, “Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere.” The Rabbit hOle is as much about communing with literature as it is about creating it: kids can craft in the maker space, and develop their own flip books and zines in the story lab.

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