The Museum of History and Industry moved in 2012 to a more prominent location, from Montlake to South Lake Union, adapting an existing historic structure (the old Naval Reserve Armory) and installing interactive and multimedia exhibits to increase kid appeal. The National Nordic Museum in Ballard also moved to a more accessible location, in 2018, and shed its folk art-and-craft focus in an old neighborhood school for a Scandinavian modernist structure modeled on a fjord. The building is fresh and smart, and stands out in New Ballard.

A display at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture during a media preview on Sept. 17, 2019. The museum is set to open Oct. 12-14. (Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut)

The latest entrant is the new Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, which opens the weekend of Oct. 12-14. It is a treasure once hidden on the northwest corner of the University of Washington campus. The new museum is now visible from the street, with an entrance on 15th Avenue Northeast in the University District at Northeast 43rd Street. It’s an elegant, wood and glass box that makes a statement: it is part of the transforming U District, with light rail coming to Brooklyn Avenue Northeast just a couple of blocks away. Natural history is not hidden anymore; it’s part of the neighborhood.

The museum is striving to be fully transparent. Museum Executive Director Julie Stein, who has headed the decadelong $106 million transformation, says she had to “pinkie swear” they were going to “make everything visible.” That is, the museum itself, its collections, exhibits, staff members and research.

The New Burke is also the old Burke in that it is a state museum, a teaching museum, a research center and a storage vault that holds a trove of specimens, fossils, art and artifacts from the Pacific Northwest and around the Pacific Rim. It’s a collection started in 1885 by teenage enthusiasts, and was formalized into the museum in 1899, when the collections expanded under the supervision of a UW naturalist appropriately called “Bug” Johnson. The collection has only grown.