Imagine you could step foot into the worlds of your favorite children’s books. One minute you’re slumbering in the great green room of Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon,” the next, lying under a tree full of monkeys with the hat peddler from Esphyr Slobodkina’s “Caps for Sale.”
If you’re in Kansas City, Mo., you don’t have to imagine it — instead, you can head straight to the Rabbit hOle on 919 E. 14th Ave.
The Rabbit hOle opened in 2024 and features immersive 3D exhibits that recreate the settings of classic children’s literature.
But the concept for this museum had been in the minds of its founders, Pete Cowdin and Debbie Pettid, for over 30 years. The couple had previously operated the now-closed children’s bookstore, the Reading Reptile.
“We started kicking around an idea like the Rabbit hOle: a place around books that was beyond a bookstore — that was a celebration of literature,” Cowdin said. “And not just best-selling literature, but the best books ever made.”
As independent booksellers like the Reading Reptile faced the rise of distributing giants like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, Cowdin and Pettid found inspiration not in a bookstore or a library, but in a museum. The City Museum of St. Louis, housed in an abandoned shoe factory and made entirely of repurposed industrial artifacts, provided Cowdin and Pettid’s children with a massive, sprawling playground — but it also gave the couple a frame of reference for how they could make their concept a reality.
After the Reading Reptile closed down, the couple spent the next few years raising money, and in 2018, they were able to secure a building site for the museum. Although the COVID-19 pandemic slowed down the museum’s opening process, Cowdin said that it also gave them more time to work on their design packages. In 2024, the museum finally opened.
After going down the literal rabbit hole at the museum’s entrance, visitors are free to traverse through over 50 exhibits, each one its own whimsical world. You can walk through Strega Nona’s humble Italian cottage from Tomie dePaola’s beloved book of the same name, stand beneath a giant mushroom with Nicholas the bunny from Ole Risom’s “I Am A Bunny,” and come face to face with a gigantic sculpture of the mischievous titular character from David Shannon’s “No, David!”
And after a long day with these beloved characters, you can stop by the museum’s bookstore and take their stories home with you, something that Cowdin says is integral to the museum’s experience.
“Let’s say they go into ‘Blueberries for Sale,’ they spend time in ‘Frog and Toad,’ or ‘The Last Stop on Market Street.’ I’ll see them down in the bookstore, and they’ll be almost begging the parents to buy one of those,” Cowdin said. “In another context, they might say, ‘Oh, that’s a picture book, I’m too old for that’ — all that drops away because The Rabbit hOle is such a collective experience.”
At a time when student literacy in the U.S. is experiencing a crisis, with 1 in 3 incoming kindergarteners lacking basic literacy skills, the Rabbit hOle is inspiring children to fall in love with reading in a new way.
“We always say we’re not a literacy organization. We’re a place where kids learn to love to read because they get brought into story in a new way, and then they create a new relationship with story,” Cowdin said. “It’s not our job to teach them how to read — we just want to teach them how to love reading, and that there’s a story behind all those books.”
At the Rabbit hOle, children can meet the authors behind those books, too. Many acclaimed children’s book authors have held talks and workshops at the museum, including Cleveland native Dav Pilkey, author of the “Captain Underpants” and “Dog Man” books, and Raina Telgemeier, author of “Smile” and “Sisters.” Telgemeier’s event included a printmaking workshop at the museum, which brought around 400 attendees and allowed 30 children to make a book with her from scratch.
“To go that extra mile where kids are having this real experience with a person is extraordinary,” Cowdin said. “Those kids might end up saying, ‘Hey, I can be a writer … I can do this,’ — and it’s super exciting.”
The Rabbit hOle’s audience may be primarily children, but Cowdin has found that it’s had a profound impact on adults, too — particularly the museum’s recreation of the iconic great green room from “Goodnight Moon,” which has moved people to tears, Cowdin said.
In July of 2026, the museum opened an exhibit based on Cincinnati native Jon J. Muth’s children’s book “Zen Shorts,” which is based on East Asian philosophies. The exhibit features a 16-foot plush panda bear that children can climb onto — and the mechanism inside the panda even gives it the illusion that it’s breathing, Cowdin said.
Other exhibits that bring representation to diverse stories include one based on “Crow Boy” by Taro Yashima, an acclaimed Japanese American author, as well as a section focused on Black American children’s author John Steptoe.
“I’ve never seen a museum do this, but every exhibit has books right there, and the kids can sit down and read the book with their parent and interact with the exhibit,” Betsy Bird, a member of the museum’s governing board, said. “And that’s what it does for contemporary creators: It’s making those links and those ties.”
Cowdin agrees.
“There’s nothing at all like the Rabbit hOle anywhere in the country,” Cowdin said, “and that’s a beautiful thing.”
