Philly’s Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion closes. It’s ‘a loss to our community’

John Cambridge held Rosie the Chilean rose-haired tarantula gently in his fingers, and slowly, she crawled onto the palm of a young woman whose eyes were tightly shut.

This was Rosie’s last rodeo, her final time being held in the hands of a visitor at the Philadelphia Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion. On Saturday, the Northeast Philadelphia museum permanently closed its doors, marking the end of a lengthy legal battle and other struggles that have plagued the business for years.

In fact, Cambridge, the museum’s CEO, and all of his multilegged and winged friends, will be evicted at 9 a.m. Tuesday. He and his employees have just a few days to relocate the thousands of preserved and living insects, artwork, antiques, plants, and educational exhibits throughout the sprawling, three-story space.

“This has been a giant art project, and I’m being forced to destroy it,” Cambridge said Saturday. It’s especially painful, he said, “to see it destroyed for such a senseless and unjust court outcome as the one that ended up taking us down.”

That case dates to 1989, when Insectarium founder Steve Kanya entered into a $350,000 mortgage agreement with Milton Rubin, since deceased, to purchase the museum’s building at 8046 Frankford Ave. Rubin’s estate filed a foreclosure action against Kanya and the Insectarium in 2017.

Kanya testified that in 2016 Cambridge forced him out of the business, and took control of the museum. Rubin’s estate did not become aware of that change until 2017, and alleged that no mortgage payments had been made on the initial 1989 debt since the business changed hands.

After a protracted court battle, in March, a Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas judge issued a $928,000 foreclosure judgment against the Insectarium. The estate also won possession of the Insectarium’s building, and the court ordered the property to go to sheriff’s sale to satisfy the money judgment. The Insectarium subsequently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but its case was dismissed, and it received no protections.

On Saturday, the museum’s regular visitors grieved the loss of the space, while newcomers cherished it for a final moment.

Jessica Gonski, 37, has brought her two daughters to the museum about once a month for the last three years. Her toddlers, ages 2 and 3, love it because each time they visit, they learn something new, she said.

“It’s a loss to our community,” said Gonski, who lives in West Philly. “There’s definitely going to be a void.”

Hand-painted murals and antiques — everything from old dental sets to brass optical pieces and carnival games — are embedded into the museum’s exhibits, and on Saturday, most of those items were on sale.

As for its live inhabitants, the museum is working to ensure that most insects stay together, Cambridge said. Many will go to Wild Things Preserve, a conservation group based in Pipersville, Bucks County. Cambridge said the museum has given the group a temporary housing structure for the animals and insects as well as resources to be able to take care of them for about a year.

“We’re very happy to have been able to transition a lot of our programs over to them just to make sure everything that we had booked for the rest of the summer is going to be done properly,” Cambridge said.

But most of the tropical plants and butterflies flying throughout the first-floor pavilion will have to be killed, Cambridge said. Because they are from all over the world and are non-native species, they cannot be released into the wild, he said.

While Wild Things Preserve is not open to the public, the group will take over the Insectarium’s off-site educational programming at schools and summer camps. The effort will initially be a joint one between the preserve and the Insectarium, but Wild Things Preserve will take over the programs completely by the end of August, Cambridge said.

In the meantime, some Insectarium staff will stay on to assist with the travel programs, he said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will inspect the building before the eviction to make sure it has been shut down properly.

The museum has had its share of struggles. In 2019, an alleged burglary resulted in about 7,000 insects, lizards, and other species going missing from the museum. Cambridge at the time estimated the value of the loss at about $40,000, and speculated that the creatures would be illegally resold. No one has been officially implicated in that case.

Last year, IMDb TV began streaming a docuseries about the theft called Bug Out. Directed by Lower Merion native and former lawyer Ben Feldman, the series examines the heist alongside the history of the Insectarium, as well as the illegal underground insect market.

Following the documentary’s release, Cambridge filed a defamation suit against the Bug Out creators, alleging that it “includes numerous factual assertions that are not true.” That case has yet to be resolved.

On Saturday, dozens of patrons visited the museum. Noelle Barrett and Jeremy Cothran wandered through the butterfly pavilion, watching with awe as the Forest Mort Blue butterfly nursed on the nectar of an orange slice. It was their first time visiting, they said; they decided to come after reading that it was closing.

“Now that I’m here, I’m sad it’s going,” said Barrett, 27. “But also, with all the drama, I get it.”

Taylor Baile, 24, who specializes in photographing butterflies, said there are few butterfly pavilions in the Philadelphia region. The closest space like this one, she said, is in Hershey, and it’s not as large.

Baile, of Croydon, reflected on the various events she attended at the museum, such as the New Year’s Eve party, where folks could spin a wheel to win a prize, two of them being “swallow a meal worm” or “put a tarantula on your face.” It was always a blast, she said.

“There’s nowhere else like this,” she said.

For Cambridge, he’s not sure what’s next. He plans on leaving Philadelphia for a while, he said, and hopes to build something similar again in the future after taking some time to “see other people doing it right.”

“I’m going to learn from it and try again,” he said. And when he does, “I’m going to build it twice as big and twice as cool as this place.”

Cambridge stood calmly in the museum on Saturday, seeming to take in all the final pieces and people. He walked through the massive outdoor space that he had planned to turn into a performance venue, amid a collection of shipping containers and cans, and thought about what could have been.

But he’s trying to stay optimistic.

“I actually have the least stressful day ever,” he said. “I just have to exist through it.”