Thinkery

Austin's children's museum stands on what used to be a runway. Robert Mueller Municipal Airport handled the city's commercial flights from 1930 until 1999, close enough to downtown that jets came in low over the eastern neighbourhoods, and when it closed the seven hundred acre site was redeveloped as the Mueller district. Thinkery opened here in 2013 as the new home of the Austin Children's Museum, which had been operating downtown since the 1980s. The building is built around doing rather than looking. Water tables, a light and shadow lab, a food and cooking area, building and tinkering spaces with real tools, and an outdoor yard, most of it aimed at children roughly under ten and designed so that adults are participants rather than supervisors. It is one of the few indoor destinations in Austin that reliably absorbs a hot afternoon. Worth knowing about the surroundings: the old airport control tower still stands nearby, and the district's street grid follows the runway alignment, so the geometry of the place is a fossil of the airfield. Families with a couple of hours often pair it with the Mueller lake park across the road, which is a short walk and has the better view of the downtown skyline.