Janis FontaineA $150 million expansion and a new CEO are reshaping the museum into a star attraction.
The Cox Science Center and Aquarium in West Palm Beach is welcoming a new director amid a $150 million expansion to transform itself into a world-class attraction more than 65 years after its inauspicious 1959 creation by women from the Junior League of the Palm Beaches.
In March, Kurt Allen, 60, arrived to lead the expansion designed to make the center attract a broader audience. That month, the city also approved the huge expansion.
They’ll keep the doors open for most of the makeover, Allen said, offering events like a huge Lego exhibit by artist Sean Kenney coming in May and summer camp.
The work started on the outside in May 2024. The center’s footprint in the 115-acre Dreher Park will increase from about 6.5 acres to 11 acres, with a good portion for more parking. When completed, the park grounds, its tree-lined walkways and benches, will be open to guests without a ticket.
Inside, the center will balloon from 35,000 to more than 100,000 square feet. And that’s just the beginning.
More than $134 million of the $150 million has been raised. The center hopes to hold a grand opening around Christmas 2027. The expansion will:
- Construct a two-level, four-story Hall of Science visible from I-95 with a learning center, aquarium, digital exhibit gallery and a traveling exhibit gallery.
- Expand the Kenneth C. Griffin Aquarium to 160,000 gallons, making it one of Florida’s largest indoor aquariums. Both salt-water and freshwater exhibits and floor-to-ceiling aquatic habitats will take visitors through the Everglades gallery, a coral reef gallery, a display on Florida’s inland rivers and a deep-water shark tank.
- Create the Schwab Family Next Generation STEAM Learning Center, the education hub, featuring larger classrooms and an expanded biology lab available to medical magnet schools in Palm Beach County.
- Complete the John Paulson and Alina de Almeida STEAM Studio, which adds art and design to science, technology, engineering and math, and features more than 50 interactive exhibits targeted at visitors 10 and under. It will have five themes: Forces and Motion, Electricity and Magnetism, Light and Color, Matter and Energy and Math.
- Complete the Digital Exhibit Gallery, which includes an immersive space capable of 40-foot tall projections of signature programs from rocket launches to inside of King Tut’s tomb.
- Double the museum’s traveling exhibit space.
- Complete the Innovation Theater for live demonstrations, guest speakers and programs featuring science, technology and innovation.
- Create the Hall of Science to serve as the new home base for regional robotics competitions and the First Lego League.
- Triple parking from 93 spaces to more than 280.
The science center leases its land from the city for a nominal fee, and the agreement has been extended for 75 years with a 25-year optional renewal.
The science center welcomes about 350,000 guests annually, including 175,000 students from Title One schools. Its goal is to attract half a million guests and educate 70 percent more children.
This is the science center’s biggest growth spurt since it was founded in 1959 by the Junior League of the Palm Beaches.
A group of women — former museum CEO Lew Crampton, a Palm Beach Town Council member, would later call them the “mothers of science” — started it in response to front page news about the space race.
“Back then, they wanted to focus on animals, geology, marine life, agriculture, history,” said board of trustees member Harvey Oyer III, speaking of what was known then as the Junior Museum of Palm Beach County. “Like it was all lumped together because we didn’t have any of those things, so they were going to squish it together in one concept.”
Hard times and a dinosaur to the rescue
The science center grew by fits and starts, changing boards and leadership every few years. But in the late ‘80s, the museum struggled financially and was in danger of closing. West Palm Beach cut its $10,000 supplement and eventually forced the museum to pay for maintenance, a 1996 South Florida Sun Sentinel story stated.
The school board cut its $50,000 annual stipend. Palm Beach County turned over the financing of the museum to the Tourist Development Council, which cut the museum’s grant to $60,000.
But James Rollings came on board in 1996 and persuaded the board to spend the equivalent of one-fourth of the museum’s budget – $200,000 – on a dinosaur exhibit. And it worked. The success of the Dinamation Dinosaurs exhibit helped usher in 10 years of big changes.
After Rollings left in 2006, the museum went through three CEOs in four years.
When board Chair Matt Lorentzen joined in 2008, the center had been operating with a deficit. The father of three, whose background was in aviation finance, led the museum into the black, boasting a $300,000 surplus in 2012.
Lorentzen, rallying support from local philanthropist Alexander Dreyfoos, helped usher in “a $5 million expansion that has made the aquarium one of the largest in the state,” according to a 2016 story in Dimensions magazine.
A new era takes shape
“And so as part of that refocus, we also had some leadership changes in the administration of the science center. Lew Crampton joined us as the CEO, and we made a much more realistic plan for the capital side,” Lorentzen said in the story.
Crampton, a self-proclaimed science nerd who had retired to South Florida, hit the ground running. In a bold move, Crampton in 2013 brought in the museum’s first major visiting exhibit — “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition.”
Crampton told the Palm Beach Daily News that individual (non-group) attendance increased by 171 percent, and revenue from ticket sales during the Titanic run totaled $535,000.
“To put that figure in perspective, the museum’s entire revenue for budget year 2013 was $524,000,” Crampton said.
In 2015, a $2 million capital campaign for improvements to the “west wing” entered Phase 2, thanks in part to a $500,000 cultural facilities grant from the state of Florida.
The Hall of Discovery included the exhibits “Challenge the Brain” and “Sprouting Science, “ and a new early childhood learning station. Another $150,000 paid for a new roof on the original aging building, built in 1964.
When Crampton left in 2018 to after winning a seat on the Palm Beach Town Council, Kate Arrizza, a former naval officer, came on board. Arrizza had grown up coming to the science center. She became the Science Center’s education director in 2009 and its chief operating officer in 2012. In 2018, she took over as CEO.
Palm Beach residents Wendy and Howard Ellis Cox Jr. made a $20 million gift in 2021 to launch a $45 million expansion campaign. The South Florida Science Center was renamed the Cox Science Center and Aquarium that year.
By the time she left in 2025 to become executive director of the Jupiter-based Stiles-Nicholson Foundation, Arrizza had bolstered the science center into one of West Palm Beach’s most popular destinations.
Enter Kurt Allen
In December, the board began courting Kurt Allen.
Allen came to South Florida after being president and CEO of the Mississippi Aquarium, where he led the $103 million development and construction of the state’s first aquarium. It opened in Gulfport in 2020. Three years later, he oversaw a $4 million update to the facility with two dozen new exhibits.
Allen had fallen in love with marine life when he ran a business swimming with dolphins in Hawaii after college. It was during COVID pandemic, and he saw it as a unique opportunity. His next career move took him to Marineland Dolphin Adventure in St. Augustine, where his own young children piqued his interest in science education.
“We wanted someone who wasn’t just a tourist attraction expert, but also understood the education process for children,” board Chair Eric Stonestrom told the Palm Beach Daily News. “So he has had a deep exposure to (improving) guest experience and making visitors happy.”
It’s a feeling Allen has come to love. “Watching a kid’s face light up when they experience something new is really what it’s all about,” he said in an interview with Stet News.
He said he had that experience as he learned about dolphins and aquariums through his children.
“I really didn’t get into the education side until I was talked into joining the board of my kids’ charter school. Then I really started to understand the impact of education. It really spring-boarded me into what I’m doing now.”
Allen supports widening the focus of his audience, not just bringing in more of them.
“Our core audience right now is really 2- to 10-year-olds, and our challenge is to expand that into the junior high and high school range. The types of programs we’re working on now will expand that educational reach to a broader audience,” Allen said.
“Our motto is to open every mind to science, and that’s the challenge. We are aware of the impact that we’re going to be able to make on our children and our children’s children. We’re building this for the long haul, and it’s very rewarding to be able to be a part of a project like this.”
The donors making it possible
Board member Oyer, whose local family roots go back five generations, said it would be impossible to imagine such growth as recently as five years ago.
“The scale in which we think now … it’s such a dramatic increase. We live in an interesting time. The new Science Museum and the new Norton are on a scale and sophistication level of which we never could have thought about growing up here.”
After the COVID pandemic, the influx of wealth brought a population with a deep interest in science as well as the arts, Oyer said.
“Ken Griffin moving here, Brightline coming here, Steve Ross investing here, local resident Donald Trump getting elected president, a confluence of things had to come together to drive this incredible wealth migration and intellectual capital migration to Palm Beach County. A $40 million expansion at the Science Center becomes a $150 million expansion.”
It wouldn’t be possible without the donors, Oyer said. “There are people at the table saying, ‘I want to do this, and I am willing to pay for it.’ And it’s extraordinary.”
“When you really pause and think, ‘Am I really getting to be a part of all this?’ It’s generational, game-changing.”
The magnitude of the expansion is part of what persuaded CEO Allen to leave his job in Mississippi. But more than the support from the new wealth, it was the center’s strong relationship with the community that appealed to him, Allen said.
“Everyone already loved the science center. It was just a matter of bringing all the right partnerships together,” Oyer said. “Their partnership with the school district, the private schools, the local archaeology society, the local ham radio operators, the local geology club, anyone who even tangentially touches science has a partnership with the Science Center.
“We were fortunate we had these retired astronauts living here, and they were donating moon rocks, they’re giving lectures, they’re hosting events. Edgar Mitchell, Buzz Aldrin, Scott Carpenter, Bob Crippen, these legends in the history of the world. I don’t mean in the history of space. They were the Magellans of our era.”
The center rallied support from unlikely sources such as golfer Jack Nicklaus and course designer Jim Fazio. “You build a miniature golf course with science experiments on it and get the two biggest-name golf course designers in the country to pro bono design your miniature golf course.”
But sometimes businesses grow too fast to be sustainable, Oyer said.
“It is not uncommon for museums to raise the money to build a giant physical structure and then not enough people come through the gates, or they’re not willing to pay a high enough rate to sustain it. And they wind up having financial trouble.
“But I think we will be able to pivot and adapt five years from now, 10 years from now.”
Bigger space, bigger ambitions
A key part of the expansion is the increase in exhibit space.
These mega-traveling exhibits have served the Science Center well since Titanic arrived in 2013.
“You need to have the best traveling exhibits in America,” Oyer said, “and to do that, you have to have the space, the parking, the insurance, the accreditation, all of the things in place so the coolest exhibit in America is going to come to you and not the Tampa Science Center, not to Orlando, not the Fort Lauderdale or Miami.”
A completion date hasn’t been established. “We’ve got many months of construction to go through to really fine-tune our processes. We’re really going from a historically smaller science center into a very different product,” Allen said. However, Allen said he and the board of trustees are hoping to give West Palm Beach a fantastic Christmas in 2027.
“It’s really becoming so much more than the little community museum that it started out as,” he said.
How it all began: A Cox Science Center timeline
1959
The Junior Museum of Palm Beach County is founded by the Junior League of the Palm Beaches to focus on the natural sciences.
1961
The museum opens on Dreher Trail in West Palm Beach with a focus on exhibits of marine and animal life, geology and agriculture.
1964
The planetarium is dedicated by and named after astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
1971
The museum undergoes its first expansion, doubling in size and adding classrooms and an auditorium.
1980
The museum is renovated and renamed the South Florida Science Museum.
2004
The museum receives its largest donation to date from the Dekelboum Family Foundation — a matching gift of up to $10 million. The museum secures more than $20 million.
2008
The planetarium is renovated and renamed the Dekelboum Planetarium. The theater is also renovated.
2012
The South Florida Science Museum begins a $6 million expansion to add a 3,000-square-foot aquarium and a 3,000-square-foot permanent exhibit section, which will contain the “River of Grass” Everglades exhibit and NOAA’s “Science on a Sphere.”
2013
- “Science on a Sphere” is unveiled. The 6-foot suspended globe displays animated images of atmospheric storms, climate change, ocean temperature, and animal migration patterns that teach science in a new way. Only 93 such spheres existed in the world at the time. This one is paid for by the Quantum Foundation’s $240,000 gift.
- The science center opens a new aquarium, which is featured on the National Geographic TV show “Fish Tank Kings,” a reality show about a team of aquarium builders. The newly renamed South Florida Science Center and Aquarium now boasts the largest aquarium from Miami to Orlando with more than 90 species of local fish.
- Crampton brings the first major exhibition to the science center with “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition.” Crampton tells the Palm Beach Daily News that 61,658 people visited the center during the exhibit’s 150-day run compared with 28,270 people during the same period last season.
2014
The Quantum Foundation underwrites major traveling exhibitions with $900,000 that brings “Afterlife: Tombs and Treasures of Ancient Egypt,” “Our Bodies: The Universe Within” and “Dinosaur Invasion.”
2015
The west wing debuts with an expanded Hall of Discovery that incorporates a nanotechnology exhibit (the science center’s first bilingual exhibit) and an early childhood education room.
2016
An 18-hole miniature golf course designed by golf course architect Jim Fazio and professional golfer Jack Nicklaus opens at the museum.
2018
The second half of the quarter-mile Fisher Family Science Trail connecting more than 10 new exhibits is completed, plus the FPL interactive splash pad SolarScape, a gem-panning station and a dinosaur walk.
2019
The museum’s most impressive permanent exhibit to date, the $2.5 million “Journey through the Human Brain,” opens. The Quantum Foundation and the Stiles-Nicholson Foundation are the top underwriters.
2020
A $500,000 open-air amphitheater opens for daily live science shows and seasonal concerts.
2021
Leadership announces a $45 million expansion campaign. Palm Beach residents Wendy and Howard Ellis Cox Jr. make a $20 million gift to launch the capital campaign. The South Florida Science Center is renamed the Cox Science Center and Aquarium.
2022
The “Dinosaur Explorer” exhibit opens and features animatronic dinosaurs from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. It draws more than 140,000 visitors in six months.
2024
Construction begins on the grand expansion.
2025
- The 2025 Smarty Party raises $2.2 million for STEM education.
- With a $7.5 million gift from Alina de Almeida and John Paulson, the museum’s expansion campaign reaches $133 million of its $150 million goal.
2026
- The 2026 Smarty Party at the Kravis Center raises more than $2.4 million.
- On March 9, Kurt Allen becomes CEO.
If you want to go
Where: 4801 Dreher Trail North, West Palm Beach.
Hours: Monday – Friday from 9 am-5 pm and on Saturday and Sunday from 10 am-6 pm.
Admission: $26 adults, $24 ages 13-17, $22 ages 3-12, $24 for seniors age 60 and older, free for children younger than 3 and museum members.
Contact: 561-832-1988; https://www.coxsciencecenter.org/
