Down the Rabbit hOle

26 October 2021

The first museum in the country dedicated to children’s literature opens next year in Kansas City — thanks to the passion and vision of Pete Cowdin ’85

Pete Cowdin ’85

Meet Fox Rabbit. Misfortune and luck found him right from the start. The poor fox was orphaned at birth, but then discovered by bunnies who took him in as their own. His adopted family raised him well. Sporting a pair of bunny ears on his head, Fox Rabbit grew into a dapper fellow with a busy mind. He steals. He’s obsessed with time. He’s into horticulture. One day, this exploring creature found something remarkable; a portal into a different world, a world of children’s stories. Let’s follow him there. 

Fox Rabbit’s portal takes us to North Kansas City, an industrial district of factories, warehouses, and, more recently, cultural and entertainment venues. We’re outside a boxy building constructed in the early 20th century as a tin can manufactory and later used by various companies for storage and distribution. But something new is growing inside: a warm, high-spirited place called The Rabbit hOle.

Founded in 2015 by husband-and-wife codirectors Pete Cowdin ’85 and Debbie Pettid and scheduled to open in 2022, The Rabbit hOle is a museum devoted to American children’s literature. It will be the first of its kind in the country. Together with their team, Cowdin and Pettid also invented the Fox Rabbit character. He is the protagonist of an ongoing story that they will develop in symbiosis with the activities of the museum and publish as an episodic series. Importantly, Fox Rabbit’s tale serves as the museum’s organizing structure, the “glue,” as Cowdin puts it, that will bind together the wide-ranging stories to be discovered here. Fox Rabbit “found the portal into the storybook world, which we have excavated at The Rabbit hOle,” says Cowdin. Visitors will follow Fox Rabbit’s exuberant, forking trail, finding hints of his presence all over the museum as touchpoints along the way — but good luck trying to come upon the elusive explorer himself!

So, don’t picture shuffling past static objects and reading labels in hushed galleries. Imagine instead the sounds of running feet and shouts of delight as visitors of all ages weave in and out of immersive, ever-changing exhibits, which the museum team makes in-house in its fabrication shop, the RAB FAB. “Discoverable environments is a phrase we use a lot to describe what we’re doing,” says Cowdin.

When it opens in 2022, adventures at The Rabbit hOle will start at the mouth of Fox Rabbit’s burrow (the museum’s basement-level entryway). Visitors will move through his dwelling, seeing teasers throughout to the stories they will encounter. Emerging from the burrow, they discover a giant blue magic tree, which Cowdin describes as “this tree that Fox Rabbit found to enter into the storybook realm. You’ll be able to walk either up a ramp or into the tree itself and then take a bridge over to the Explor-a-Storium. And by that time, you’re totally, firmly in the space.”

First Floor layout of the Rabbit hOle.
First Floor layout of the Rabbit hOle.

The Explor-a-Storium is The Rabbit hOle’s heart. Spanning two floors (and already with plans to expand in the future), the Explor-a-Storium will be a feast of children’s literature come alive off the page. Visitors will find storybook characters everywhere, some animated, which they can feed, ride, hug, take a nap with, and more. They will walk through pages of books built out into multiple gallery spaces. On the second floor, they can trace the history of the form through the 100-Year Panorama, a sweeping display populated by storybook characters from the past century, among them those from out-of-print titles that Cowdin and Pettid want to revive in The Rabbit hOle.

There’s much more to be found in addition to the Explor-a-Storium, including a generous slate of programming that will take advantage of the museum’s various activity spaces, like the Tons of Fun Room, as well as its resource library and reading room, print shop, writing lab, and, eventually, a theater.

Second Floor layout of the Rabbit hOle.

 

Second Floor layout of the Rabbit hOle.

Naturally, the museum will have a bookstore. And this brings us around full circle to the origin of Cowdin’s and Pettid’s own story, before The Rabbit hOle, before the storybook realm, before Fox Rabbit. From 1988 to 2015, Cowdin and Pettid owned a much-loved children’s bookstore called the Reading Reptile, also in Kansas City. They ran it successfully through the ups and downs of the industry, weathering the advent of superstores like Barnes & Noble and the internet. But by the early 2000s, the increasingly difficult bookselling environment began to take its toll. For years, they had been thinking about other ways to celebrate children’s literature and reading, projects that might be more mission-driven than retail. “It was just this natural thing,” says Cowdin. “You know, we don’t really like what we’re doing that much anymore. We have enough life and energy to try to do one more big thing. That’s the life adventure. So, we just stepped away from what we were doing. We had all these ideas, and we had nothing to lose.”

While we have everything to gain from Cowdin’s and Pettid’s leap into the adventure of making a place poised to draw everyone into the fullness of books and reading.

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