Menlo Park Museum

The museum is currently closed for renovations and will re-open in Spring 2011. We encourage you to watch this website for updates.

Located within Edison State Park, the Center consists of the Art Deco Edison Memorial Tower and a small museum devoted to Thomas Alva Edison's time of immense creativity at Menlo Park. The museum, located at 37 Christie Street, Edison, New Jersey, is open:

Thursday - Saturday 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM

The non-profit Edison Memorial Tower Corporation (EMTC) invites you to both visit the museum and Tower and explore our website for the exciting plans to "reinvent" Menlo Park in order to better honor and interpret the site's tremendous historic significance. The reinvented Menlo Park, which will consist of a restored Tower, a newly constructed museum, outdoor interpretive exhibits, and a rejuvenated 36-acre Edison State Park, will provide an important cultural and civic amenity to Edison Township and the surrounding area.
The Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park and Edison State Park are jointly administered by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Parks & Forestry; the Township of Edison; and the Edison Memorial Tower Corporation.

Tower Restoration

The surrounding community is justifiably proud of the history of Menlo Park, and they have commemorated it with several monuments, most notably in 1937 with an Art Deco memorial tower and in 1947 with a small museum.
However, the Tower has deteriorated to the point where the concrete is crumbling, exposing the corroded reinforcing rods in its walls. It has been closed to the public for years and a chain link fence keeps would-be visitors at a distance to protect them from falling masonry. Preservation New Jersey has named it one of the state's top endangered sites.
By 2006 it was clear to the Edison Memorial Tower Corporation (EMTC) that something had to be done. The EMTC engaged Watson and Henry Associates, specialists in preservation architecture and engineering, to investigate the condition of the Tower and develop a plan for its restoration. The firm, which conducted its initial investigation into the Tower's condition in 1994, updated its findings in 2007 and concluded that the Tower is structurally sound, but water damage and cycles of thawing and freezing have damaged its façade. Watson and Henry's investigations and recommendations are being utilized in the current phase: development of construction documents for the restoration of the Tower.