Everyone noticed the fence posts going into the ground. They saw the fencing start to go up. It ran around the front of the building, alongside the parking lots and down the service road into the valley. Staff wondered in emails what was up. There were theories. It was Metrolinx, the Ontario Line. Or something to do with building repairs. Or maybe it was a new strategy to control parking during the upcoming summer camp crush.

What no one suspected was that it was a perimeter fence being put up to secure the building they were working in. Or that the following day, Friday, June 21, 2024, the Ontario Science Centre they and the rest of the province had known and loved for almost 55 years would be unceremoniously and inexplicably shut down.

Staff showed up for work that next morning as usual. There was a message around 11 a.m., instructing them to attend an “all staff meeting” that afternoon. People working from home were asked to join remotely, but people in the building were told to leave their posts in order to attend—something that almost never happened. It put them on edge.

These people were no strangers to bad news. In June 2022, they’d been told that “the bridge”—a key passageway from the front of the building to the middle and the back—would have to close due to safety concerns. Then, the following year, in April 2023, they were told they’d be moving from their home at 770 Don Mills Road to a yet-to-be-imagined facility at Ontario Place.

As it turned out, there was no need to wait for the all-staff meeting to get the news. Around noon, the Toronto Star published an article with the headline “Ford government abruptly closes Ontario Science Centre after report found roof in danger of collapsing.” A link began circulating in workplace group chats. Some staff found out while they were hosting exhibits or interacting with visitors. Some learned from visitors, a few of whom gazed nervously overhead, asking if it was safe to even be there.

Many who read the article didn’t believe it. It would only be a temporary closure, they reasoned, maybe in the fall. Peak season was about to begin, summer camps were booked, they’d just brought in a new exhibition and a new movie.

But in the 2 p.m. meeting, the worst was confirmed. Engineers had discovered, management told them, that the roof was at risk of collapsing in the event of heavy rain or snow. A difficult decision had been made. The Ontario Science Centre would close that very day. They had until October 31 to get out of the building.

Shock. Rage. Helplessness. Devastation. Grief. That’s what people were feeling. It was like a death—an unexpected, untimely death.

Staff knew that the building had been neglected for over a decade and that repairs were needed. But that it had to be closed immediately? They didn’t buy it.

About 250 people work at the Science Centre and they are an unusual bunch—highly engaged, dedicated, probing. Their central mandate is to get people to ask questions. Not surprisingly, they had many. Why can’t the building stay open for the summer? Why not fix the roof? Why not close the building in sections during repairs? What is the evidence of imminent danger? How does this new report square with reports from the joint health and safety committee? What about the hundreds of other Ontario buildings that had the same concrete tiles—and weren’t closing? Why October 31? Can this be fought?

When the meeting was over, many staff, including some whose shifts had ended, went out onto the floor. It was hitting them that this might really be it. They put on their white lab coats and did the things the Science Centre does. Just like the promos promise, they delighted, they informed, they challenged. They made hair stand on end till the very last minute. The building was full of people—so alive. It didn’t feel like this could be the end, but it was.

When they left the building that night, the large digital billboard out front had already been changed to read “Closed.”

The Science Centre was built in 1969 as a Centennial gift to the people of Ontario. It was designed by Raymond Moriyama to be deliberately confusing so that you could go inside and get lost in science and wonder. It was revolutionary in that the exhibits were made to be handled. There were live demonstrations too—in the glory days, there was everything from a laser show to a TV studio, from a planetarium to a working foundry, a cryogenics lab to a print shop. And, of course, there was the iconic electricity show, with the Van de Graaff generator, a.k.a. the ball that makes your hair stand up.

These are the things most people think of when they recall their school field trips and family visits. But the building contained other things too. Most extraordinarily, within those walls were workshops with craftspeople—woodworkers, metalworkers, electricians, artists, designers, and more—who worked together across expertise to research, develop, and fabricate on site. It was the secret sauce. It was why the exhibits could be so good. An international sales department, also in-house, sold and rented these creations to other museums, and took orders for bespoke exhibits.

There were science educators, to teach school groups about physics or DNA or space flight simulation. There were summer camps, birthday parties, sleepovers, weddings, and corporate retreats. There was a whole class of grade 12 students inside that building, lockers and teenage drama and all, doing a full semester of science and innovation.

Now all this, everything, had to be packed up.

Some people believe that the Ontario Science Centre is an entity separate from its building, but I’m not one of them. I think that the soul is hard to extract from the body. There was something about that bridge with its spectacular views across the valley, the long escalators with blue jays and cardinals out the windows, the nature walks and celestial viewing parties. Something about how everywhere you turned there was something you wanted to spend time with. A tower of garbage! Inuit snow goggles! A bird’s eye view of flight! A room that spun so you could feel centrifugal force! The escalators, the movie theatre, the bathrooms—they all tried to show and to teach.

If the closing of the building felt like a death, the emptying of the building was a sort of washing of the body. It was intimate, emotional work. The employees could have hired outsiders to do it all, but these exhibits and artifacts were their babies, and they wanted to wrap them and send them off with care and dignity.

Still, it was hard. It always is when there’s an unexplained death. They were never given a rational explanation for closing the building. Architects argued it was safe to keep open. The engineering report said as much. People had offered to pay for the repairs. Yet here they were, preparing the corpse. Some felt complicit and dirty. Others felt it was duty.

Just getting into the building was a trial. There were now checkpoints. Gates had been installed after the closure, and there were two sets of security guards, one their own and another brought in from outside, making sure everyone was legit. There was even a police officer.

The packing up and moving out—or “decant,” as the process is called—was chaotic. There was mass confusion. Who could blame them? Half a century of museum and four months to figure it out. What would be kept, what would be decommissioned, what would go to interim locations? It was more top-down than people wanted. They worried they’d never see some of these items again.

People were losing sleep, gaining weight, getting sick, feeling sad. They were demoralized and heartbroken. Still, they painstakingly dismembered exhibits, wrapping them and labelling them. Live animals who’d lived and been loved in the building—a huge tortoise, the many creatures of the Rainforest—had to be re-homed. The loom was given away. The gigantic whale skeleton was packed up, but it’s not clear where it was taken.

Other treasures appear to have been left behind. The Breath exhibit in Human Edge. The Castle in KidSpark. The climbing wall. The Silent Tunnel. The tall trees in the Rainforest. The murals painted onto the walls.

The tree ring, too. You know the tree ring—the huge cross-section of Sitka spruce that had hundreds of rings because it had been alive that many years? The one where kids would stand with their arms out to show how big it was? That school groups used as their meet-up point? It was still there at the end. It had a little sticky note on it, and with the kind of double entendre the Science Centre had become famous for, it said, simply, “Heavy.”