What's up, Chicago? I'm Erin Allen, and this is Curious City.

Picture this.

It's 1893, and we're at the World's Columbian Exposition.

Men in bowler hats and tailored coats.

Women in puffed sleeves holding parasols

gliding across the Colombian basin in Jackson Park,

in gondolas.

They're rowing up to the Palace of Fine Arts, or what we know today, as the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.

This year, the museum announced it was renovating that entrance on South Portico that looks toward Jackson Park.

It was, after all, the building's original entrance.

The museum is also adding a cafe and an outdoor terrace.

This announcement got Curiousity listener Laura Olson thinking more about the museum's past and its founding.

I taught economics for almost 30 years, and at the end of the course, we would talk about altruism.

And we would talk about people like Marshall Field who donated the Field Museum or who was

Adler or who was shed.

That's Max Adler, who was at one point

the vice president of Sears Roebuck and Company,

and John Graves Shed, Marshall Fields, protege.

And then we would get to the Museum of Science and Industry,

and, you know, I would say Rosenwald,

and the kids really had a blank stare of who that was.

The Museum of Science and Industry opened in 1933, a year after the death of its founder, Julius Rosenwald.

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