OMSI: Portland's Hands-On Science Museum

On the east bank of the Willamette River in Portland sits a museum that began with a civic argument about what Portland deserved, and ended up with a Cold War submarine parked outside.

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry traces its origins to November nineteen forty-four, when Oregon's Governor Earl Snell convened a committee of one hundred citizens to ask whether the state needed a museum dedicated to science and industry. The committee said yes. Volunteers spent the next decade holding small exhibits around Portland and raising money. In nineteen fifty-eight, thanks in large part to a fifty-thousand-dollar gift from the Swigert family and guaranteed loans from ninety prominent citizens, the museum opened a permanent building. It became known simply as OMSI.

The institution has moved twice since then, always growing. Its current home on Southeast Water Avenue, opened in nineteen ninety-two, occupies a converted industrial building on the riverfront with two hundred thousand square feet of exhibition space. Five permanent halls cover energy, chemistry, engineering, earth science, and the human body, all built around the principle that learning works best when you can touch the thing.

The planetarium, named for hydraulic engineer Harry Kendall, is the largest in the Pacific Northwest, with a two-hundred-seat dome used for astronomy programs and, on weekend evenings, laser shows.

But the most unexpected exhibit is docked just outside. The USS Blueback, the last non-nuclear diesel-electric submarine in the United States Navy, was decommissioned in nineteen ninety and brought to OMSI, where it serves as a walk-through exhibit. Visitors can peer through a working periscope, duck through the torpedo room, and squeeze through the crew quarters of the two-hundred-nineteen-foot vessel. Film buffs may recognize it from the movie The Hunt for Red October, where the Blueback played a Soviet submarine.

OMSI draws about eight hundred thousand visitors a year, making it one of the most-visited museums in the Pacific Northwest.