Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • Page 8-6

123456 6 CHICAGO TRAVEL By Michael Kilian Tribune staff reporter those pining for the sight of a pink fairy armadillo, large tree shrew, blue wildebeest, dik-dik, bushpig, bush dog, disk-winged bat, greater spear-nosed bat, armored rat or grasshopper mouse, there is good news. You travel to Africa or some such exotic place to satisfy your yearning. A trip to the National Mall here will now suffice. This weekend, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History opened its new Hall of Mammals, a sprawling, interior expanse that will be home to well-preserved specimens of the creatures named above, plus 264 others, including the short- beaked echidna, the Chinese water deer and the white rhinoceros. In marked contrast to its dull, staid and scholarly predecessor space, the new hall is an airy, lively, friendly and very accessible equipped with high-tech interactive screens, displays and devices to make it inviting and interesting for children.

There is a decided emphasis on making the animals as animated and lifelike as possible, arranging them in natural (and sometimes intimidating) settings and poses (modern day taxidermy involves not the creatures but stretching their skins over custom-designed Styrofoam molded forms that allow for every conceivable position). Thus one of the giraffes to be on view has splayed its legs and bent down its long neck and head to drink from a water hole, while the other is fully erect, pulling leaves from a tree with its blue, prehensile, 21-inch tongue. The hall is dedicated to reminding visitors that the history of life on Earth is a history of evolution, and that, when contemplating such creatures as the bongo, the Dzhungarian hamster and the crested macaque, museumgoers will be looking at their own, however distant, relatives. exhibit is designed with families and children in mind and reminds us all that we are also said museum director Cristian Samper. In fact, human beings are rep- resented in one of the displays, though thankfully not as skin- covered Styrofoam form.

In one of the exhibition interactive a high-tech night vision system that allows visitors to view a nocturnal rain forest as a hu- Smithsonian adds to its wealth of museums A hall that gives mammals a high-tech look Smithsonian C. Hansen A Bengal tiger caught in mid-leap is among the attractions of the new Hall of Mammals. Visitors to the Hall of Mammals will see these golden lion tamarinds engaged in grooming. PLEASE SEE MAMMALS, PAGE7 By Michael Kilian Tribune staff reporter is not your museum transportation exhibition. The Smithsonian National American History Museum opens its huge, new, 25,000 square foot Hall of Transportation on Nov.

22, with some still fairly novel ideas: That history is not something old and dead but all about life in different times; that museum exhibitions are not solely for scholars but are primarily for ordinary people; and that they should connect and interact with people at a wide variety of intellectual, emotional and sensory levels. Consequently, when you visit On the you will find: Beneath a gigantic locomotive from yesteryear, chuffing as it stands in a station, a replicated cat pursuing a replicated mouse. In an exhibit on Chicago rapid transit in the 1950s, featuring an actual Ravenswood line car, a full-screen video representation of people boarding in 1950s clothes and talking about the Bears as they were on Dec. 15, 1959. All the while, the car rumbles and its lights flicker and the dark shadows of buildings appear to flash by in an eerily realistic replication of motion.

Nearby, on an actual stretch of pavement from the fabled Route 66, eight travelers in vintage 1930s vehicles tell their stories about why on the road in the midst of the Great them, the parents of country-and-western legend Merle Haggard. Another of these westbound motorists is a musician named Bobby Troup, who with his wife Cynthia drove from the East to Los Angeles along the famous highway and was inspired to write the song Your Kicks on Route He and the others tell how it came about. And, though Elvis Presley is conspicuously absent from the postwar Portland, car dealership displaying the genuine 1940s hot rod he drove in the 1957 movie one of the several vintage motorcycles nearby is ridden by a life-size figure looking exactly like Marlon Brando in the 1953 flick Wild human figures we use, the sound and lights, part of an attempt to bring this whole thing to said on the project director Steve Lubar. want to just show locomotives; we want to bring them back into For decades after the museum first opened in 1964, the transportation hall was little more than a gigantic garage. It contained such memorable artifacts as the 90-foot-long, 260-ton Southern Railway No.

pulled Franklin funeral train and the engine room from one of the buoy tender vessels that worked New York harbor in the 1920s. But mostly it was rows of parked and identified but accompanied by little in the way of relevant explanatory text and even less to re-create the time and place in which these artifacts were used. Locomotive No. 1401sat on a short section of railway tracks and gave off a few sound effects, but there was no presentation of the role railways played in the American South in the early 20th Century, and the extraordinary height deprived visitors of any view of the interior. Now No.

1401sits alongside a raised station platform. Instead of a few sound effects, a multifaceted presentation of recorded railroad sounds and conversations provides museum-goers with a total and accurate sound picture of what it was like to be near one of these behemoths while it was standing in a this case, Salisbury, N.C., in 1927. It provides more than that. Seated on a bench is the sculpted, life-size, polyurethane figure of Charlotte Brown, an African-American woman who was prevented from riding the train because of her race. Bound for the north to escape southern poverty, she tells her story (via a repeating tape recording of her later radio broadcasts).

She is one of dozens of lifelike figures scattered throughout the sprawling exhibition. And visitors are invited to touch them as well as listen to them. have two voices in these said museum director Brent Glass. have a curatorial voice, presented in the texts and labels, but we try to give voice to a lot of other speakers, where the travel experienc- An exhibit that will really move you National Museum of American History In 1903, it took a couple 63 days to make the first auto trip across the U.S. in this Winton touring car.

PLEASE SEE TRANSPORT, PAGE7.