To afford my studies at the Academy of the Fine Arts, I worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, where I had perhaps the best office in the city. My drawing board, with a five-foot-tall stuffed emu standing right next to it, looked out over events on Logan Circle, including Pope John Paul II leading an open-air Mass there in 1979.
I am definitely not a scientist, but I spent my time laying out the Academy’s Frontiers magazine and creating signage for exhibits around the museum. The job expanded my education, as I had to find out what terms like limnology and herpetology — among many other –ologies — meant. It was a privilege to meet the Academy scientists who worked in those and other fields, and the staff who welcomed and taught swarms of Philadelphia school kids who sat transfixed before the museum’s dioramas.
In addition to its scientists, the Academy’s world-renowned library is 250,000 volumes deep and covers texts from the 16th century up to the present day. It includes reports from the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806, and the reports from all of Capt. James Cook’s 18th-century expeditions around the world, among hundreds of other treasures.
For visual artists, there are historic volumes with jaw-droppingly beautiful renderings of plants and animals.
In the scientific departments, another 19 million specimens are contained, including Thomas Jefferson’s fossil collection and birds collected by John James Audubon. Outside the library, the Academy’s dioramas beautifully recreated habitats and mesmerized the hundreds of thousands of school kids who trooped by them over the decades, stopping as teachers would explain what they were looking at. The towering Corythosaurus, one of more than 30 species represented in Dinosaur Hall, greeted young and old visitors in the entrance gallery. We’d sell all this off at Sotheby’s? Really?
The leadership of Drexel University, which now owns the Academy, should recognize that to dismantle this jewel in Philadelphia’s educational, cultural, and scientific communities would be a travesty. Certainly, the many top brains in Philadelphia’s renowned collection of institutions of higher learning and in the offices at City Hall can spend some time pondering how to secure the Academy for today’s children and scientists and for all those to come in Philadelphia’s future.
We would be a poorer city without the Academy of Natural Sciences.
Signe Wilkinson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, spent 35 years as an editorial cartoonist at The Inquirer and the Daily News.