Crayola Factory

Easton, Pennsylvania

Any parent who's rendered their home "child-safe" can tell you there's more to it than toddler-fingerproofing a couple of electrical sockets. It requires systematic removal of glass items, knickknacks (and anything, really, you don't want instantly destroyed), chucking the sharp-edged furniture, stowing the poisons. All the convenient luxuries taken for granted by the childless must go.

"Factory workers" Koury and Jeff are ready to prove crayons are safe to eat.

Corporations worry about child safety too, especially when little crunchers are on company premises taking a factory tour. It's one thing for hypersugared Sammy to lose an arm to an auto assembly line stamper, or bruise his skull on a winery fermenting vat. Those tours are designed for adults (or at least more well-behaved kids). But how to explain a mishap at the cereal factory flash baker, the chocolate dipping chamber, the Crayola wrapping station?

Those kind of factory tours are going the way of Hershey's Chocolate World or the World of Coca Cola... by eliminating the factory. Kellogg's opened Cereal City USA in Battle Creek, MI, in 1998, filling the void left since their tour closed in the 1980s. Cereal City USA is a multimedia, interactive cereal experience, not a factory (and it has since closed). Binney & Smith, the company that owns Crayola, has been operating the Crayola Factory in downtown Easton for at least five years, under a giant box of spillng crayons. No factory ... it's a "unique family discovery center."

The Crayola experience is the center floor in a three-story brick building that is cohabited by the National Canal Museum and the Two Rivers Landing Museum (one of 12 being built at prominent canal landings).

The first stop is to learn about the manufacturing process -- two "workers" demonstrate how crayons are made, while in the background a large electronic counter flashes the constantly climbing quantity of crayons in the world. The workers are separated from visitors by a transparent partition, like a bank counter, with gaps for passing out samples to the crowd.

We ask about that unmistakable crayon smell. Koury, one of the factory demo workers, points out that crayons are not toxic. "You can eat 3,500 crayons a day, and they are not as toxic as one glass of city drinking water." Koury and his demo partner, Jeff, head over to the magic marker demo and the crowd follows.

The Crayola Factory is composed of a series of fun stations, each promoting appealing kid activities using Crayola products. Adult employees help out or explain technique. In a dim room with colored light projections, an older man explains how color and light work. Visitors draw on 35mm slides and project them on the walls. At another station, Model Magic -- Crayola's Silly Putty-ish cross between bread dough and marshmallows -- can be molded into sculptures and animals.

For the most part, this "factory" has been rendered completely child-safe. A blocky metal drying oven sits in one hallway, where Crayola artists can make their wet media compositions permanent. It is carefully outfitted with Plexiglas shields and warning signs. But everything else is cheerfully soft-edged and nontoxic.

On our original visit to the Crayola factory ten years ago, it still included a factory. The odor of warm waxy crayons was reassuring -- something we miss in the new place's better ventilated setup. The Crayola Hall of Fame artifacts have been relegated to a lower traffic corner, though there is a crayon box photo op. You can still see (but a sealed display assures you can no longer touch) the paraffin-spattered shoes of Emerson Mosler, who made an estimated 1.4 billion crayons during his 37 years at the Crayola plant.

Still, the new place is popular, the centerpiece of Easton. As we head down to the giant Crayola gift shop, a museum employee tells us that 350,000 visitors came to the Crayola Factory in 2000.

October 2003: As part of the celebration of Crayola's 100th birthday, the World's Largest Crayon was added to the exhibits. It's 15-ft. long, weighs 1,500 lbs., and was formed from blue crayon scrap "leftolas" mailed in from kids around the country.