Please Touch Museum

This guide to the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia opens on a September morning in 2015 when its leaders filed for bankruptcy owing sixty million dollars, then rewinds to Memorial Hall's start as the art gallery of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. The hall sat nearly empty by the 1980s, until a 2005 gamble, an eighty-year lease and sixty million dollars in bonds for renovation, banked on selling the museum's old building. That sale fell short of what the plan required.