What it is
The Children’s Museum of Phoenix is three floors of play inside a school. The building is the Monroe School, a neoclassical elementary designed in 1913 by Los Angeles architect Norman Foote Marsh and opened in 1914 for 800 pupils at the corner of Seventh Street and Van Buren, a few blocks east of downtown Phoenix. It closed as a school in 1972, sat empty, went on the National Register in 1977, and was bought by the city with bond money in 2001 so that a family museum could have it. The museum opened on June 14, 2008 and has been downtown’s best-loved building for small children since.
Inside are more than 300 things to do, and the museum uses that phrase rather than “exhibits” on purpose. A multi-story climbing structure fills the lobby. A room of hanging foam noodles, a pretend market and kitchen, a book loft, a block-building room, a paint-on-the-walls art studio and a water area take the floors, and a separate space is reserved for babies and crawlers. It is built for children from birth to about ten and is honest that the sweet spot is eighteen months to seven.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale does not have one. Our Scottsdale with kids note has the Railroad Park, the splash pads and the resort pools for the under-tens, all of which need weather; this is the indoor morning for the day it is 112 or raining, and the only museum in the Valley built entirely for that age. The Arizona Science Center two blocks west picks up where this one leaves off.
The practical version
Twenty-five minutes from Old Town via Loop 202 and Seventh Street, with its own lot. Hours are daytime and the museum is typically closed Mondays; check the calendar for the day. Buy tickets online and arrive at opening. Two to three hours is the visit. Bring a change of clothes.
When to go
Weekday mornings in the school year bring field trips at about ten; a weekday afternoon or the first hour after opening is the quietest. Weekends are full from the start, and summer weekends are the busiest days of the year, because every parent in the Valley has run out of indoor ideas by July. The museum runs sensory-friendly sessions and member-only hours on a posted schedule, which are the calmest times in the building if they fit.
What to do, in order
- Third floor first. The art studio, where children paint on the walls and themselves, and the building rooms. Nearly empty for the first forty-five minutes.
- Second floor. The market, the kitchen and the book loft, which is the place to sit down.
- The noodle forest and the climber. Save the two famous things for last, when the first wave has moved on. The climber runs up through the building and parents are allowed in; wear shoes you can climb in.
- The baby room. If you have one under two, this is where the morning is spent, and it is separated from the stampede.
Eating
The cafe is a snack counter, and the museum lets you bring food for the picnic area. For a real lunch, Heritage Square is a short walk west on Washington, with Pizzeria Bianco in the old machine shop and shorter lines at noon than at night.
The neighborhood
The museum sits where downtown turns into the Garfield district, a grid of 1910s bungalows that has filled with cafes and bars in the last fifteen years. The Science Center, Heritage Square and the Diamondbacks’ ballpark are all within four blocks to the west.
The story
The Monroe School was the biggest elementary school in Arizona when it opened in 1914, and it is still the handsomest: a two-story Classical Revival block with a columned entrance, designed by Norman Foote Marsh, the Los Angeles architect of Venice’s canals. It served as an elementary and then a high school until 1972, then sat empty for three decades while downtown emptied around it, with the city’s school district and preservationists arguing over what it was for.
The answer came from a group that had been trying to start a children’s museum in Phoenix since the 1990s. In 2001 voters approved $10.5 million in bond funds to buy the school and begin renovating it; the museum raised the rest, renovation began in 2006, and the Children’s Museum of Phoenix opened on June 14, 2008 with the climber rising through the lobby. It saved the building, which is the thing the city’s preservation community still thanks it for. In March 2026 the museum announced a $23.5 million campaign for five years of work that will bring the school’s remaining 27,000 square feet of unused interior into play, so that all 80,000 square feet are in use, and add 10,000 square feet outdoors.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s historic schools went a different way: the Little Red Schoolhouse became a history museum and Loloma School a transit center. Phoenix turned its biggest old school into the place every Scottsdale parent with a four-year-old ends up on the hottest week of a visit, and our museums note lists it among the Phoenix institutions close enough to count as local.
Getting there
Loop 202 west from Scottsdale to the Seventh Street exit, south about a mile to Van Buren Street; the museum is on the southeast corner, with its lot off Seventh Street. About twenty-five minutes with no traffic; twenty from the Camelback-corridor resorts straight down Seventh Street. Light rail stops at Van Buren and Central, a long walk with a stroller, and Scottsdale has no rail anyway; our getting around note covers the car-seat problem with rideshares.