The Philadelphia Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion to close for good Saturday

The Philadelphia Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion will close for good Saturday evening, and the business will be evicted from its longtime home in the Northeast section of the city on May 30.

That will mark the end of a legal battle that has plagued the museum for years.

“I’m heartbroken to see it end like this,” said Insectarium CEO John Cambridge. “It’s really sad especially to see it destroyed for such a senseless and unjust court outcome as the one that ended up taking us down.”

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

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

Now, an eviction is slated for Tuesday at 9 a.m., Cambridge said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will inspect the building prior to the eviction to make sure it has been shut down properly.

The museum has also taken steps to ensure that its inhabitants will stay together, Cambridge said. They 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.

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 added.

The closure of the museum is the latest in a series of recent struggles the Insectarium has endured in recent years. In 2019, an alleged burglary resulted in an estimated 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 attorney 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.

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

“I’m certainly going to build something again,” Cambridge said. “And I’m going to build it twice as big and twice as cool as this place.”

Until then, the last day to see the Insectarium we know today arrives Saturday. It will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. After the museum closes for the day, there will be a farewell party. Anyone who has been part of the museum’s history is welcome to attend, Cambridge said.

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