Paw-some! Giant Scottie dog Monopoly token arrives for new Hasbro Game Park

Still about two months out from its big reveal, the Hasbro Game Park, one of two new outdoor features at The Strong National Museum of Play, remains very much a work in progress, fenced off and filled with construction crews and heavy machinery.

Recently, though, the first indication of what is to come was lowered by crane into the middle of the 17,000-square-foot space facing Howell Street: a 10-by-14-foot replica of the Scottie dog token from Monopoly.

He’s still enclosed in white shrink wrap, “kind of like a cocoon,” said Christopher Bensch, the museum’s vice president for collections and chief curator.

But when he emerges, he’ll look just like the iconic game piece — complete with fur contours and a metallic finish — and will be joined by other supersized Hasbro game elements made by Minnesota-based Tivoli Too.

The company sent Bensch pictures of the fabricated pieces before they were shipped, “And if I didn’t know how big furniture dollies were, I would never have known that that Scottie dog wasn’t the kind that was sitting on my Monopoly board," he said.

The park — developed with funding from Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, whose family founded Hasbro toy company, and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation — is a relatively small part of a 90,000-square-foot, $65 million museum expansion that will be unveiled June 30.

However, it will give the downtown attraction something that in surveys prospective visitors living within a five- to six-hour drive said might inspire a road trip: more active space.

With a goal of boosting annual attendance to 1 million from around 600,000, museum officials took the feedback to heart, particularly given the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which in 2020 cut the number of visitors to 175,000.

Plus, said Bensch, “We wanted a space where kids could blow off a little steam, or parents could get a breath of fresh air. We’ve got our café right next door. You could bring your cappuccino out here, sit at one of the tables that will be on our terrace, and just have something that we currently don’t offer."

In addition, “We get very busy on rainy days," he said. "We wanted to give a reason that it would be fun to go to the museum on a sunny day as well.”

Besides the giant Scottie dog, the park will be home to:

• A race-car Monopoly token replica measuring 9½ feet long by 3 feet wide that guests can sit in.

• A 7-foot-high walk-in Monopoly hotel piece and a 6½-foot-high Monopoly walk-in house piece.

• A Get of Jail Free area — with bars.

• Four Scrabble tiles, each measuring 9 by 10 feet and spelling out the world “PLAY.”

• A forest of 11- and 13-foot-high candy canes from Candy Land.

• A playable Simon game measuring 10 feet in diameter.

• A rideable Game of Life spinner that’s 21 feet around and works like a playground merry-go-round.

• A giant Trivial Pursuit-shaped planter with wedge-shaped benches.

• Scaled-up Jenga pieces that people can walk across like rocks in a creek, because “We couldn’t let you climb a Jenga tower,” Bensch said.

• An artificial turf-covered play area.

• And the pièce de resistance: an 18-foot-high fire-breathing dragon from Dungeons & Dragons.

“That’s our signature piece and the flashiest,” said Bensch, adding that the sculpture's wingspan will almost match its height. “So, that is the part that we are most eager to see and I think our guests will be most eager to see.”

The city fire marshal already has weighed in, and the installation had to meet some engineering requirements along the lines of what would be needed to operate a hotel firepit running on natural gas, he said.

Only, Tiamat, as the female dragon is called, will run on propane because propane produces “more interesting colored flames than natural gas does,” Bensch said. “It’s one of the things I never realized I would need to know.”

And Tiamat actually has five heads, so another will expel mist.

The sidewalk winding through the park will be painted to resemble a Candy Land board. “That will give people the sense that they are playing pieces in a giant board game,” Bensch said.

All the elements will be ADA-compliant, he said. For instance, the Game of Life spinner will be at-grade so people who use wheelchairs or scooters can access it.

The park has one indoor feature: Just inside the door of what is now the museum’s main entrance, but will become its exit once renovations are completed, is a Chutes and Ladders game covering an entire wall.

“If the weather’s not pleasant outside, this is what people will concentrate on,” Bensch said.

Near the new entrance, dubbed the Portal of Play, will be a 20-ton granite ball floating via hydrostatic pressure on a thin film of water. Visitors, even little ones, will be able to move the ball “with just a quick swipe,” said museum spokesman Shane Rhinewald.

The outdoor areas will be open year-round, Bensch said, as long as paths are safe to walk.

It is Rochester, after all.

“We will not close just because it’s cold,” he said.

Reporter Marcia Greenwood covers general assignments. Send story tips to mgreenwo@rocheste.gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @MarciaGreenwood.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Strong Museum of Play readies for opening of new Hasbro Game Park