An insistent toddler, eyes wide, gazes skyward past the outstretched neck of a Futalognkosaurus in the soaring atrium of the Royal Ontario Museum and lets his preference be known. “Where that? THAT?” he proclaims, pointing urgently upward while his grandmother translates to a bemused museum volunteer: the boy is fixated on the huge, disc-shaped ocean sunfish model installed in a second-floor window gallery, visible from below.

Somewhere, if you believe in that kind of thing, Charles Trick Currelly is smiling. This is the museum that the ROM’s founding director envisioned. Currelly was an early innovator of children’s programming, one of the first. When it opened, on March 19, 1914, he had pre-loaded the ROM with the kind of wide-eyed wonder still on display here. He was just as insistent that his new museum be on the streetcar line, and that staunch populism, with access for all, remains a pillar of the museum’s identity.

Since the day it opened, it has been anything but elite. Wander by any weekday and the lineup of big yellow school buses clogging the museum’s University Ave. pullout tell you as much. So do their cargo: the chattering hordes of children that throng the museum all day, every day.

In the museum’s grand central hall, towering Nisga’a and Haida totem poles visible in the nearby stairwells, parents attend to toddlers in strollers while older kids run screaming up and down the wide open space created when the ROM fused its jagged new Crystal extension to its stately old yellow-brick hide in 2007.

Older people, childless but apparently unbothered by the din, read the paper or consult a museum map, plotting their next move from the museum’s nexus. Across its 40-plus galleries, the ROM offers fossils and armour, furniture and birds, fish, reptiles, a cave full of bats, various threads of Canadian history, dinosaurs, Greek, Roman and Middle Eastern artifacts, Egyptian mummies and Canadian First Nations culture, giant squid, narwhal, a sunfish, a white South African rhino and, clustered together, objects from Mexico, Central America, the Pacific Islands, Samoa and Africa. Just for starters.

It’s a lot under one roof. Premier Kathleen Wynne, speaking last week at the ceremonious opening of the ROM’s new show, The Forbidden City , a collaboration with the Palace Museum in Beijing, addressed a crowd packed with Chinese dignitaries about the significance of cultural and economic exchange between the province and the burgeoning economic superpower. Then, she related her own childhood experience of the ROM: “When I walk in the door, I’m looking for dinosaurs!” she said enthusiastically, prompting ROM CEO Janet Carding to politely rebuild the diplomatic bridge. “Isn’t it wonderful that we’re the only museum in North America that has both dinosaurs and a stunning Chinese collection?” Carding said. “That’s what makes us special.”

Special, yes, and a bit of an anomaly. One hundred years ago, broad offerings like the ROM’s were the norm — the British Museum, chock-full of bits and pieces culled from the Empire’s global occupations, shared space with the exploding scientific fields of botany, animal biology and paleontology. But now is not then. With the broad spread of its collections proving too vast to manage in a single space, The British cleaved itself in three: by the late 19th century, its natural history collections (plants, animals, minerals and dinosaurs) were carted five kilometres down the road to form what’s now known as the Natural History Museum. In 1997, its huge holdings of books and periodicals were shipped off-site and became The British Library.

Museums haven’t only focused over the ROM’s lifespan; they’ve evolved and adapted, sometimes painfully, to drastic shifts in the communities they’re meant to serve.

The founding notion of many museums, of dispatching experts to far-flung places to gather unseen exotica for the waiting western masses (Currelly’s memoir, I Brought the Ages Home , smacks of more than a little self-regard) couldn’t be more of an anachronism — especially here in Toronto, where a plurality of global cultures pass by the ROM’s jagged Crystal on a daily basis.

Over the years, the ROM, beloved, popular and populist, has become less a pinhole to faraway worlds than a primer for the present and increasingly diverse future outside its doorstep. That fact is not lost on them.

“We want to be part of the DNA of this city,” says Carding. “It’s great that we’ve all found a way that people can come from all parts of the world and forge new relationships, and find new meeting points and points of cultural value and understanding. I think it’s really important we’re part of that.”

Important in more ways than one. The ROM, an agency of the province of Ontario, is the biggest recipient of government funding among its museum peers. Its 2012-13 operating budget was $54.5 million, with slightly more than half of that coming from the government. It puts pressure on the museum to craft an appeal broad enough to attract a range of ticket buyers — not to mention philanthropists — in a rapidly diversifying city.

It’s hard to imagine that the province, under any regime, would allow the ROM, with its huge priority on children’s education, to languish, but that broad appeal is critical to its relevance and ability to thrive.

Carding is sipping tea in her office with a view south over the broad expanse of Queen’s Park. Her office, three years after her arrival from the Australian Museum in Sydney, has a lived-in feel. The walls are lined with books from shows the ROM has put on in her short tenure: Brazilian contemporary photographer Sebastiao Salgado, Canadiana wilderness painter Paul Kane. “My show and tell,” she smiles. On the wall opposite her desk hangs a jagged model of a portion of cliff in Newfoundland where ROM paleontologists recently discovered some of the earliest fossils on earth.

The ROM has always endured growing pains, partly because it has always grown. The Crystal, 100,000 square feet of jagged gallery space looming over Bloor St., is just the most recent. In 1979, facing lagging attendance and a severe space shortage, the museum closed completely for almost three years as it built its south wing, housing collections, laboratories and classrooms.

It wasn’t without its trials. A group of anonymous curators implored the then-minister of culture, Reuben Baetz, to conduct an independent audit of the museum’s “rampant” financial confusion. At the time, the rhetoric was apocalyptic. “The Royal Ontario Museum is dying,” wrote Frank Jones in the Star on Feb. 17, 1980, as the museum packed up its treasures to prepare for construction.

It didn’t, of course, resurfacing in 1982 and building its attendance to more than a million per year by 1986. But 20 years later, growing pains returned.

In September 2005, looking for ways to underwrite the Renaissance ROM campaign, which would culminate in the building of the Crystal, the ROM looked to sell its McLaughlin Planetarium, just south of it on University Ave. The suitor was a developer looking to build a 46-storey condo tower. The plan was met with community opposition and, under threat from prominent donors Joey and Toby Tanenbaum to withhold a $1-million donation if the ROM went forward with the plan, it relented in November. It eventually sold the property to U of T in 2009 for $22 million.

Buttressed by a lead $30-million gift from Michael Lee-Chin, whose name is emblazoned on it, the Crystal opened in 2007. Once the shine came off its aluminum hide, attendance flagged, dipping below 1 million, a historical benchmark for the modern-day ROM, in 2007-08. It jumped back over 1 million for the three years following but has dipped again: in 2011-12, attendance was 987,543 and 2012-13 was no better, drawing 985,591.

This was no small issue, given the fact that the Crystal’s construction was meant to increase visitor capacity to 1.6 million. Carding was prompted to a pre-emptive strike: following the advice of a consulting agency, she reduced admission prices in late 2011, in some cases as much as 30 per cent.

Then, looking to preserve the museum’s robust, broad mission, Carding went looking for cost efficiencies. That came in summer 2012, when the museum announced to staff that it would look to shave $3 million a year from its salaries, roughly 10 per cent, through voluntary severance.

It’s all been part of a sea-change in how the museum does business: identifying who it serves and how it serves them. Schoolkids and retirees are important, Carding agrees. But the gap between them needs to be addressed.

“I take seriously that we’re for the people of Ontario, not the people of Ontario between certain age groups,” she says. Namely, the museum’s Friday Night Live program, a late-night party atmosphere aimed unapologetically at 20- and 30-somethings looking for a good time.

Initially, it chafed with some of the old guard. “I hated it. I just hated it,” says Dan Rahimi, the museum’s vice-president of gallery development. “In fact, I almost killed it. But then I went to the galleries and saw the most amazing thing: Every gallery had people in it. It was like people who were too cool to like a museum had been liberated somehow.”

Since its inception in 2012, it’s been a huge hit, drawing as many as 3,000 people a night and more than a few copycats: the Art Gallery of Ontario’s First Thursdays program followed closely on Friday Night Live’s success, to similar throngs.

“It’s not about the hours we’d like to keep, it’s about the hours our audience would like us to keep,” Carding says. And her mission — a museum’s friendly face, with an accessible collection, staff and resources — is never far from mind.

(Besides trotting curators out for informal chats with the ticket-buying public, she’s said she wants them blogging from the far corners of the planet when they’re on digs. “My message to curators is: don’t stop doing your research, but also be open to a broad public,” Carding says.)

But the ROM presents a unique challenge. “What drew me here is that this museum is very unusual,” she says. “It sums up what people have been trying to do here the last 100 years. It is the sense that you can go anywhere in the world, at any time in the world and it’s all here under one roof. It’s an encyclopedia and, ultimately, I think that that’s a very special thing.”

Special, maybe. But not easy. “The ROM really does have this dual nature,” Rahimi says, “which on good days I think is great and on bad days . . .” he laughs. “I think, ‘Oh my God, what are we trying to do here?’”

An archeologist by trade, Rahimi has risen over his 26 years at the museum to become one of the director’s chief lieutenants. A rumpled, professorial sort with a warm, welcoming teddy-bear like presence, he jumps from project to project: The Forbidden City exhibition to Of Africa , a year-plus slate of events and exhibitions focused on contemporary and historical culture there.

“We have whales decomposing buried in different beaches in different places,” he says, speaking about another upcoming exhibition. He mentions this to suggest the ROM’s diversity is also its strength. “But it won’t be a show just about mammals, but about the people whose lives have depended on them, living or historical. There are whole cultures built around the whale. To have all that expertise in house is very, very nice.”

How it began

Whether or not Currelly or Sir Edmund Walker, his co-conspirator and political and financial driver, had any of this cross-pollination in mind 100 years ago is anybody’s guess. One thing, though, is certain: both men had a mind to position still young Toronto in the register of world cities and a major museum would be one of its calling cards.

Walker, who was the founder of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, fought political battles, wooing the Legislature on everything from government funding to location (the museum’s site, at University and Bloor, was regarded by the province as too far from the centre of things back in 1909; Walker, convinced the city would grow north, lobbied hard to put it there).

Currelly was the charmer: a brilliant young archeologist as adept at field work as he was at rallying the powerful and influential to his particular passions.

Stories of Currelly’s easy charm abound. Toronto luminaries trekked miles into the desert on the backs of mules to catch a glimpse of the young visionary at work. At a dig in Deir el-Bahri in Egypt in 1909, Currelly entertained Edmund Osler, the richest man in Canada, and Mrs. H.D. Warren, the wife of the president of Dominion Tire and Rubber. She was suitably charmed, wrote Dennis Duffy in a 2006 edition of the Journal of Canadian Studies, handing over “cash on the spot to pay for the colouration of the tomb wall that Currelly had cast in plaster.”

With Currelly stirring up new connections from whom to cull home-run objects for his museum in progress, Walker stickhandled the logistics. He had been the head of a 1906 Royal Commission that restructured the University of Toronto; within it, there was a proposal to amalgamate the collections of the various colleges into a university museum. Here, Walker saw an opportunity for something grander and, with Currelly, the means to make it happen.

Other museums, Duffy wrote, had stuck to provincial concerns. Walker’s museum, still affiliated with U of T and its breadth of research experts, would be global in its reach, tied to the research interests of the university and a public institution for all.

Building a world-class collection from the scraps of cobbled-together bits from the various colleges would prove daunting, but the pair persevered. When the province, then led by premier Sir James Pliny Whitney, complained of cost overage, powerful friends would step in to purchase prized objects for the museum. Osler, at one point, quelled unrest in the Legislature by telling Whitney that “if there’s any objection from the House, I’ll pay it out of my own pocket.”

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“They started with what they had, which was a lot of rocks and minerals,” Duffy said. “Then George Crofts wanders into the museum one day, and the whole China connection begins. So what you have are these opportunistic leaps: you try to make those miscellaneous collections you’ve got the best that you can make them.”

Crofts, of course, is both a pillar of the ROM’s international reputation and a reminder of old-world museum collections and how they were built. A China-based antiquities dealer — the twin lions that perch on either side of the ROM’s University Ave. staircase came from him, among countless other remarkable objects — hit it off with Currelly, opening up the pipeline that would fatten the ROM’s China collection into one of the world’s best.

William White, Bishop of Honan, a Chinese specialist who had worked as a missionary there, met Currelly in 1924 and the collection deepened.

But the collection also underscores the imperialism that underpinned the rabid pursuit of the exotic a century ago. China, in the aftermath of a 1911 revolution that ended two millennia of imperial rule, was ripe for the picking. A nation in turmoil, unable to safeguard its own cultural heritage, is fertile ground for opportunistic collectors and China was no exception. Thousands of treasures flowed freely out for years, along with people who left by the million.

This is tricky terrain, which the ROM has learned painfully and from experience. This may be the ROM’s centennial, but it’s also the 25th anniversary of a far more dubious distinction. In 1989, the museum tried to turn the lens on that imperialist practice of traipsing abroad to bring home the exotic with Into the Heart of Africa .

The exhibition was meant as self-critique, Rahimi says, but it backfired.

“It became a landmark in the museum world of how not to design an exhibition,” he says ruefully. Two steps into the exhibit, viewers were greeted with a historical illustration from The Illustrated London News, of a British soldier plunging his spear through a Zulu warrior.

In an instant, the museum was besieged: vehement accusations of thoughtless racism came from every corner; on the front steps on University Ave., picketers protested daily and loudly. It was an unintentional galvanizing moment for Toronto’s African-Canadian community, forging new protest groups from that singular outrage that persist to this day. It all culminated in a violent conflict between protestors and police that resulted in arrests and charges.

When the dust settled, the curator, Jeanne Cannizzo, was forced to resign. The show, which had been planned as a touring exhibition, finished its run but went no further. The scars it left still haven’t quite healed. For the museum, it was a departure point.

“It was a naive view on the part of the museum to think we could do an exhibition that way,” Rahimi says. “The ROM changed after that experience. Everything we do now we do with community consultation. Every exhibition that we do that relates to people who are living goes through the community consultation process, where we invite people in and we talk to them.”

Meanwhile, Of Africa , a year of projects aimed at building a bridge back to Toronto’s African-Canadian community, kicked off last month.

That openness is front and centre of the new ROM, and especially in the Janet Carding era. The world knows the museum is full of iconic objects, from the Haida and Nisga’a totem poles to the exquisite Daoist wall mural Homage to the First Principle , a linchpin of the museum’s China galleries.

What the world may not know, maybe, is their how and why. Carding means to change that, in a friendly way. On weekends, curators are routinely sent into the galleries, trucking bits and pieces from their research — an archeologist with pottery shards, a paleontologist with fossils, a fish biologist with jarred specimens in formaldehyde — for informal chats.

Research and public interaction are the twin pillars of the ROM, “but they’ve almost been like two separate organizations under one roof,” Carding says. “What I’ve been trying to do is bring the back of house and front house together.”

How? “To interest the curators in talking to the public and the public in talking to the curators.”

Easier said than done? “Once you’ve made the introductions, everyone has a great time,” Carding smiles.

Indeed, times change and the ROM has done its best to change with them.

Collections — all 6 million objects — are being prepared to undergo the arduous process of being photographed, catalogued and put online to bring the museum in line with the smartphone era.

“In simple terms, I can’t police experience you have in the museum anymore and I wouldn’t want to,” Carding says. “People don’t want to just hear from us, they want to be the conversation starters. And I think that’s a good thing.”

There’s still much bridge-building to be done, though. One of the ROM’s hallmark experiences for viewers is nostalgia — childhood memories of being shepherded around the museum for the purpose of higher learning — and the drastic shift of both the public and museum priorities, era to era, remains a palpable thing.

“I remember to this day the dioramas of First Nations peoples I would see at the ROM as a kid,” says Joyce Zemans, who teaches in York’s Communications and Culture program, of the static, clichéd displays that used to be the norm of any museum’s ethnographic display. “Those exhibition styles shaped generations of children’s understanding of our relationship to first peoples. It’s fascinating, the power of these places.”

Zemans is a co-editor of Museums After Modernism , a collection of essays from 2007 about old imperial institutions and their attempts to slough off some of the missteps of the past. At the ROM, she says, “they’re trying desperately to animate the space. The question is, what’s the sticking power and how does it frame the museum? Is it a public space, a social space, do the collections matter? Those are questions still to be answered.”

Carding is determined to do just that. “I want to make sure that this is one of the first great museums of the 21st century, not one of the last great museums of the 20th century,” she smiles.

“If we come back and look at what the founders were saying, they were very clear: the wanted this to be a major museum for what they thought was going to be a world city.