Tucson Museum of Miniatures
by Jane St. Clair

When I was a little girl in Chicago, my dream was to grow up and be the tour guide at Colleen Moore’s Dollhouse. I just knew I wanted to spend all day by that dollhouse.

But the Museum of Science and Industry did away with tour guides and replaced them with recorded messages.

Although technology dashed my dreams, I grew up anyway, as most people manage to do. Luckily, we moved to Arizona, home of the Tucson Museum of Miniatures.

And what an enchanted place it is! They have not one, but 500 DOLLHOUSES! Each one is its own little fairy tale.

You get not only castles for your princes and princesses, you get little houses for elves. Gnome rooms. Bridal salons for brides the size of Thumbelina.

There’s a magical tree with windows where you can peek and see how fairies live. A forest of Kewpie dolls.
A Christmas village that goes on and on under silver trees.

Then there’s the floor made like a window that surprises you with miniatures under your feet. Miniatures everywhere is the motto here!

I like how you can find celebrities hanging out here like Scarlett and her Rhett, Geppetto and Pinocchio.

But what I like best is how you get to remember being six years old when dollhouses fit you better than the bigness of the adult-controlled world.

The Tucson Museum of Miniatures has the official name of Tucson Mini-Time Machine Museum of Miniatures.

That’s a nice name for it, because so many of the little dioramas and dollhouses are tiny representations of other eras. A 1920s Great Gatsby house preparing for a wedding. A 1940s tenement building with a sailor saying good-bye to his sweetheart. A white Christmas interior from the 1900s. And an Old Dutch kitchen from the 1600s.

The museum also has enchanted tiny places full of gnomes and wizards, pink toy stores, and fantasy castles.

The makers of these little enchanted places have given us a fairy tale, so we thank them for that. We thank them for filling our eyes with wonder again.

It reminds me of this poem by Lewis Carroll:

Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

To plan your trip to this museum, click here. A lot of people don’t know that you can find fairies in the Arizona desert. To learn how to do that, click here.