LYNN — Alisha Stephens attends Free Fridays every year at the Lynn Museum for a very simple reason: Her children love it.
Thar Chan, 8, and Caralyn, 4, colored at a table in the Museum’s expansive first-floor meeting and exhibit space while Stephens explained why the museum is worth the trip.
“They do a lot of free stuff throughout the year and there is plenty of space for the kids, inside and out,” she said.
Museum Interim Director Elena Hirshman-Seidel and her staff on Friday filled the first and second-floor exhibit rooms with music, kids tables and part of the miniature model depicting 19th century Lynn created by modeler Todd Gieg, who spent months recreating Market Street and the city’s waterfront in miniature.
Children played on the enclosed lawn abutting the Museum grounds and shoemaker Sarah Madeleine T. Guerin demonstrated shoe and boot-making techniques used by workers who made Lynn an industrial powerhouse for two centuries.
In conjunction with museums across the state and the Highland Street Foundation, an arts support organization, the museum has offered Free Fridays for three years. The focus on the arts downtown this week helped enhance the Museum’s Friday attractions.
“It’s great it is the same week as Beyond Walls. We can support one another,” Hirshman-Seidel said.
A Lynn resident, Stephens initially brought her children to Free Fridays to give them something to do on summer days. Its changing exhibit themes and insights into Lynn’s history attracted her back to the Museum.
Sara Fox-Ray lives in a century-old home near Sluice Pond, and her interest in its history prompted her to visit the Museum and learn more about the city.
“You always learn something new about the history of Lynn,” she said.
Her children ate Slushies on Friday while Fox-Ray listened to Guerin talk about “ten-footers,” the small, free-standing workshops like the one on display on the Museum’s grounds.
“Women and children made the uppers in different sizes and styles and then turned them over to be stitched onto soles. It was all invented in Lynn,” Guerin said.
Hirshman-Seidel said Free Friday sets the stage for a fall community day showcasing Gieg’s miniature landscape with its detailed three-dimensional portrait of a bygone Lynn.
“We’re trying to give people a little piece of Lynn they may not know about,” she said.
