Titanic Exhibit at the Metreon

This exhibit was awesome… alas it’s gone.
When I watch those Discovery specials and I see the Titanic steaming away from harbor, I think…“wow. I actually touched a piece of that ship.“
When good exhibits come to the Metreon, GO!

The Titanic exhibit was a lot of fun.
The exhibit opened in June ’06. After watching the movie a couple times on TV, it made me want to check out the exhibit even more. What really pushed me to go is finding out that they were only going to open for one more week (so hurry and go!)
Tickets are 22 per adult, 5 bucks extra for the audio tour. Before entering, they pass out «boarding passes,» each with a brief details about an actual passenger that boarded the ship. At the end of the exhibit, we can find out if our passenger survived the disaster. I survived!
The exhibit is packed with artifacts, stories and all the details down to the nitty gritty. It showed the difference between classes, what kind of food they ate, videos of the collision, etc. Some of the rooms had creaky wooden floors, carpet, and tile. They even added audio effects!
I won’t get into too much detail about the exhibit, go and see it for yourself!

psssssh 78K usd adjusted dollars for the luxury suites… pocket change.
despite my laziness, the lady got me out to this exhibit. i actually enjoyed it alot.
although it pissed me off i was a «third class» passenger, i guess i shouldnt complain, i survived. i guess the folks on the life boats realize someones gotta do their dry cleaning.
im a big history buff. it was fascinating to read some of the back stories. people make history. it comes alive when you realized that people actually lived through such events. its add a human aspect to it. glad i got to see it before it left sf…
big ups for the money goes to good cause clause.

I recently checked out the Titanic exhibit at the Metreon — ’cause every once in a while you just gotta play tourist — and wasn’t disappointed!
It was cool to see artifacts from the ship (it’s amazing how well some of these items held up), recreations of rooms on the ship (the grand staircase was pretty sweet) and learn about the ship itself, but the things I found most interesting were:
— The stories about people who were supposed to be on other ships (or no ship at all) but got switched over to the Titanic for various reasons. Makes you realize how one adjustment or decision can (literally) change your life.
— The part of the exhibit that documents how the artifacts were recovered, and the things that needed to be done to them so that they wouldn’t disintegrate when exposed to air after being buried in the murky depths of the ocean for so long.
— The simulated iceberg… it was just cool (pun intended) enough to touch it, but it tasted funny, maybe from all the hands that have been on it. At least my tongue didn’t stick to it… much. Okay, so I didn’t lick the damn iceberg, but it was still cool!
— The piece of the hull. That is one huge slab o’ ship!
Overall, there were a few elements of the exhibit that were cheesy, and it’s a crap shoot as to the people who end up walking through the exhibit with you (there were a few loud talkers and the occasional rude person), but overall it’s worth checking out, especially if you’re at all interested in that kind of stuff…
It’s a good thing that they didn’t play that damn Celine Dion song, otherwise y’all would be reading about the ‘Metreon Massacre’ on SF Gate…
As an FYI, my passenger died, and the exhibit has been extended until January 28^th, as of now…

YOU have to see this before it’s gone! I have never been a huge fan of anything Titanic. I was actually dreading going to this thing, but many of the reviews posted here were actually very helpful.
It was actually Kristina R’s review that convinced me to tell the hubby about this exhibit. (he’s a HUGE!!! Titanic fan) Thanks KR, i know if I didn’t tell the hubby about this and he found out about this later I would have been in deep shit.
OK OK I actually liked the damn thing. It wasn’t cheesy it was real stories about real people (kinda like Unilocal!). And there was alot of science involved about how it actually sank and how they are retrieving the artifacts and preserving them. That was really cool. You’d be surprised how much paper has been recovered from the depths of the sea after over 70 years under water. Anyways go see it… take your hardcore Titanic fans with you.

Let me first CONFESS that I loved the movie (No comments please, I am a sensitive guy ;-) so I was only impressed all the more with the movie as I walked through the exhibit. i took my 10-​year-​old daughter and it was a great experience. There was an appropriate amount of reverence combined with the just plain eerie feeling of it all. A little pricey, but worth it!

The effort they put into this exhibit is as tragic as the original event. Hopes are high at the outset, since I think charging 22 bucks for admission means it is going to be amazing. But the re-​creation goes quickly from cool to lame – the ship hallway is rad but then as you get into the dining room and see cheap linoleum floors and thrift store wicker chairs and are supposed to believe this was how it looked on the magnificent ship they keep bragging about, your hopes sink. sorry about the pun. I also love how crowded with tourists it is, who apparently come from parts of the world where you don’t learn how to look at things without shoving other humans out of the way or standing in front of them.
Also, minus minus minus for the tacky gift shop. 20 dollar boxes of «real coal!» from the ship, and rock candy icebergs for the kids? Why not little people popsicles? During the whole exhibition, they act like the Titanic movie doesn’t exist, and yet offer a 30 dollar Heart of the Ocean necklace. Because that part really happened.

Even though as a kid was both fascinated and horrified by the movie, «A Night to Remember,» I was ambivalent about going to see this exhibit. The hefty admission charge dissuaded me as well.
When my friend, C and her two kids (ages 6 and 9)
asked me to go, I decided to go with them today.
The kids are fascinated by the Titanic the same way I was as a kid. They’ve seen the Leonardo di Caprio/​Kate Winslet/​james Cameron version and were eager to see the actual artifacts. When I asked my friend, C, about whether the kids were afraid of the sinking boat and the bodies floating everywhere, she replied, «Not really. What really scared them was when Leonardo was painting Kate in the nude.»
I got into the exhibit as soon as we were handed our boarding passes. I was a young Finnish woman in 3^rd class.
My friend, C, was a 3^rd class passenger too.
We both looked at each other and exclaimed, «Uh-oh…we know what happened to us!» Her son was a crew member. Her daughter, a first class passenger.
Even though there was a line going in, the exhibit never felt crowded.
We were all able to see the fascinating exhibits.
I felt the things were put on display in a respectful manner. Interspersed with the artifacts were photographs and quotations and videos. There were recreations of a lst class stateroom, a 3^rd class room and other public rooms.
You really got a sense of what the boat was like for all the different classes of people from walking down a hallway of the 1^st class staterooms, pass the Grand Staircase and finally into the 3^rd class compartments and boiler rooms.
There is a faux iceberg to touch and a HUGE piece of the actual boat. And a smaller piece of the boat to actually touch.
At the end of the exhibit is the wall with all the names of the passengers divided into survivors and those who did not survive.
The crew, the musicians, 2/3’s of the 3^rd class, ½ of the 2^nd class and ¹⁄₃ (?) of the first class did not survive. My Finnish woman and her husband managed to survive, as did my friend and her daughters, passengers. Her son, «the photographer» did not.
My only gripe about this exhibit’s and other museums’ admission prices are way too high for many people. It was «just» a splurge for me, but an impossibility for others. Hope that the Metreon offered
free tickets to some student groups or others in the community.

This was an amazing exhibit. You start of being handed a card with the name and info of a real passenger on the ship. Then you get a «Welcome Aboard!» and off you go. All in all, the best parts were the recreations of the rooms and hallways and seeing the differences between First and Third class.
I thought it was esp. cool that when you entered the room about the iceberg, the temp was about 10 degrees colder, giving you the affect of the night. Plus you actually got to touch iceberg (or what it would have been).
Best thing was at the end, there were lists of the passengers and who survived and who didnt. You could find you «Name» on the wall and see if you survived or not. It also gave you a idea how many passengers from Third Class and crew died.
All in all… totally awesome, worth the 20 bucks. or at least worth mom paying for your tickets!

Thanks to Unilocal,I was able to experience the Titanic Exhibit a month before the it leaves SF. The exhibit is well done, and one of the best sensory experiences I have had in a while in a museum. I believe they purposely turn the temperature down low so that you have a feeling of what that fateful night was like. The recreations of the staterooms and grand staircase is amazing, but the actual piece of the Titanic’s hull and giant block of ice that simulates the iceberg which you can touch are the highlights of the exhibit. You cannot imagine how cold it must have been in that water. Sadly, people died of hypothermia before they had a chance to drown. Only ¹⁄₃ of the passengers survived, and at the end of the exhibit, you see all of the names of those who made it and those who didn’t. You might be surprised to find out if your passenger survived or not — my 24 y.o. 3^rd class female passenger made it.
One of the most touching parts of the exhibit for me was seeing the quote from Ida Straus, the wife of the co-​owner of Macy’s, who refused to get onto a lifeboat and leave her husband behind. The quote went something like this: «I will not leave my husband. All these years we’ve traveled together, and shall we part now? No, our fate is one.» Remember that sweet scene in the movie where they depicted the old couple holding each other in bed as their room flooded? That was Ida and Isadore Straus. That scene made me cry like a baby.
It’s phenomenal what they were able to recover from the wreckage, and so touching to recount the stories of passengers who lived and who were lost forever.

So well done. Top-​quality job and great recreations of the 1^st class cabin hallway, cabins, grand staircase, boiler room, and on where you feel like you’re really there… The exhibit itself is totally feng shui. Really great all-​around.

WAY cooler than I thought it would be (despite my fellow Unilocalers’ glowing reviews, I had my doubts about how interesting an old shipwreck could possibly be). Go on a weeknight to avoid any crowds – it’s open til 9:30!
Best features are how well it’s laid out and the obvious care that was taken in the preservation and presentation of the materials. Spooky but not too morbid for kids – though I was more than a little traumatized that my «boarding pass» said that I was not only in third class (did you SEE those, bunks, eww), but that I was only 18 years old and on my way to a NUNNERY, and that I didn’t survive the crash. Come to think of it though, given the choice… I like to think she jumped.

Woah! What’s with all the bad feeling here? Do you know how hard it is to retreive things that have been under two miles of ocean for 70 years and put them on display so they don’t disintegrate?
I have never seen the movie Titanic. I studiously avoided it, and I am now very glad, since my appreciation of this exhibit can’t be sullied by ridiculous Leonardo di Caprio impressions.
I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibit, steep price tag notwithstanding. It really does give the feeling of being there, and both the opulence and the tragedy are palpable – (not a nice way to die, either, drowning in your own cabin or in the subzero ocean because someone thought «oh, we don’t really need lifeboat space for ALL of the passengers and crew».. .) it is worth it just to go and ponder our ongoing cultural fascination not only with the idea of the folly of hubris – (what a weird Puritan idea that is – we say the ship is nearly unsinkable, so dammit, is deserves to sink?) but also with the coming age of promised wonders that many believed the Titanic represented. Did they come? I don’t know.
The sheer amount of work that it takes to make an exhibit like this happen is staggering to consider. The artifacts themselves are terrible mute testimony to individuals — seeing glasses, or a little beaded handbag, or a recovered cuspidor or fancy cupid detail from a once-​beautiful statue in a glass case as though they were Egyptian treasures is a little odd, but then you think «These belonged to someone who didn’t want to die, or adorned something that was sumptuous to look at,» and your view of your own handbag or glasses changes just a little.
And you get to touch an iceberg!
The gift shop is admitedly a little creepy. I just don’t know how I would feel about wearing a bracelet with a little lump of coal from the Titanic’s boilers that was recovered from the ocean floor in it.
I only would have liked more information at every turn — nothing was annotated enough for me. However, well worth seeing.

This exhibit is done well, but it is not amazing. People are just drawn to the tragedy of the Titanic — it is a moving part of our cultural story. And it is difficult to not become emotional when reading the long lists of names of those who died in this exhibit. The Titanic itself is universally mysterious and personal. That said, the exhibit lacked any detailed information and what was provided was simple and sanitized.
The artifacts were presented in dimly lit showcases with very little information about the individual items on the case tags. There were also less artifacts than I expected. There were two architectural reproductions: the Grand Staircase and a First Class Stateroom, but they were poorly done and looked fake. It didn’t seem the exhibit actually had enough material to fill the large space it occupied. Some of the items in the exhibit, such s the model of the Titanic as it currently sits on the ocean floor, looks pretty travel-​worn and dirty.
The audio tours: a complete rip off! They did not provide any extra information; in fact, they basically read word-​for-​word the signage throughout the exhibit. Don’t bother paying an extra $ 5 — on top of the $ 22 ticket — for them. Also, my headset had awful sound quality; I could barely make out what the narrator was saying and just stopped bothering with it half-​way through the exhibit.
I will say the replica of the iceberg, which was actually frozen to the same temperature as the ocean water the night of the crash, was impressive and made the Titanic experience real. That it glowed icy blue was also visually stunning. And the large section of the hull was fascinating and impressive.
I would like to mention that the website for this exhibit advertises that it is benefiting San Francisco public schools, but neglects to specify how in any way. If they are donating money to the schools, I would like to know how much. Or is the benefit merely the presence of the exhibit in town? This exhibit is not that affordable for children with individual children’s tickets costing $ 15 and no student discounts. It seems deceiving.
This exhibit is being run by a private company for-​profit. And while viewing the exhibit I couldn’t help but wonder why the U.S. federal court granted this company, RMS Titanic Inc., the exclusive rights to recover and conserve artifacts from the sunken Titanic. I’m not sure what gave America the rights to a ship built by a British company and sunken in International water (and closest to Canada than the U.S.). It bothers me.
I’m not saying don’t see it. Just that it won’t knock your socks off.

I think a lot of people have already given a lot of good details on the exhibition and highlighted on a lot of the very amazing features it has. I wish I could have taken photographs… I wish I could have seen more, really. I didn’t get the audio because one review said that it was basically reading off the text that was on the posterboards. I also confirmed that with someone that was seeing the exhibition that it didn’t add all that much to it… but I still had this feeling that I was missing out on something: P Still, I throughly enjoyed the exhibition. And I definitely felt discomfort when I put my hand on the iceberg.
Going at around 6 or 7 in the evening was good because there weren’t that many people there. I tried to get a discount for my ticket by saying that I’ll take the BART home (they need to see a ticket to give you a discount)… but that didn’t work (I really was just joking) :P
The boarding pass I got was for a first class female passenger, yay. She died while all her friends survived, boohoo.

Tip: $ 5 off the regular admission price with a BART ticket of at least a $ 3 value (good for two tickets, discount is good until Sept 15). While $ 17 for admission was still a bit much, I think it’s worth checking out the articles from a ship that was once dubbed as unsinkable. It’s a part of history that continues to intrigue us 90 years later.
A LOT of care has been taken to restore and preserve the items from the Titanic’s fateful voyage back in 1912. It’s amazing to see the types of items recovered, from personal belongings (letters, wallets, jewelry), to actual ship pieces, from thermometers to a sink. Going through the exhibit, seeing what it was like to wine and dine in first class to the simplicity of third class living, reading quotes and short bios from passengers to crew, takes about an hour. Aside from a chunk of the ship’s hull on display, I especially liked the real iceburg (which looked like plastic from afar).
Each person is given a boarding pass before entering the exhibit. Each pass represents an actual person that was a passenger on the Titanic. The happiest moment was when I found out that as a third class passenger – most of whom perished – I managed to live. My friend wasn’t so lucky.
The gift shop kinda creeped me out. A slippery water toy (think, snow globe) with a floating Titanic and an iceberg? Replica menus from the night the ship sank? Titanic games? Those aren’t souveniers I’d actually enjoy.
There are several other Titanic exhibits showcased throughout the country. This particular one is at the Metreon till January 7, 2007. Catch it while you can.

They give you a Titanic passenger to be when you enter. I was a 16 year old girl who loved music and shopping. First class passenger… HAY!!!
The artifacts were cool but did begin to get pretty creepy once I passed the grand staircase. The ice wall made me sad for those poor people who tried to survive in the water. The number of third class passenger deaths was insanely higher than I had imagined. That bummed me out, too.
Great exhibit… go when touristy folks aren’t all up in your way. Stupid tourists.

No more «Where the Wild Things Are?» If that’s the case, I guess the Titatanic is an acceptable use of the space. There are over 300 artifacts, and it takes 27 semis to move the exhibit (this information is from people who work there. That said, $ 22 is fairly steep, despite some very cool pieces (like jewelery and suitcases from the ship). I liked that they had two different audio tours available for children and adults, but there were a fair amount of 4 – 8 year olds running around when I went on a Monday afternoon, causing general havoc and reducing the ability of any adults not with them to be able to enjoy the show.
Much of the exhibit is done in black, and that’s never so effective in creating a mood as when the ship hits the iceberg. As Kristina R mentions, LOVE the iceberg. You can also touch a part of the ship. I was really impressed by the woman handling the audio tour, which we didn’t do based on Ringo’s advice, but she was very knowledgable in introducing the tour, which I wouldn’t have expected based on my experience at the Metreon three days earlier.
(UPDATE: Show has been extended to January 7, making it a nice option for parent/​grandparent visits in the fall or over the holidays)

I was at the Metreon with a couple of friends. Our movie was a late show, so we decided to see the exhibit. Even though it was $ 22 bucks, it was for the schools, and we like to spend our money on things like that instead of beer. Also, one of the friends that was with me is a teacher, and she would have killed me if I had refused. They gave us fake tickets and let us wander around freely. It was a little unnerving at first, because all of the pictures on the walls were of people who had died. The stuff on the tables, like the money, was cool. And I liked the fake stairway that simulated the real one. The block of ice was supposed to be like the iceberg that took the Titanic down, and it was definitely impressive. A worthwhile exhibit for a great cause.

Thanks to James Cameron’s ego, I must confess to a certain level of cynicism regarding the ‘unsinkable’ ship.
Any cinematic schmaltz dissolves immediately when confronted with actual artifacts recovered from the shipwreck. You get to examine up close everything from jewelry to clothing to reconstructions of staterooms and the grand staircase to a 15-​ton piece of the actual hull. The wall of ice is a nice added sensory experience.
Of particular interest is the vast array of currencies and promissory notes from banks all over the world – the dollar was not as universally accepted back then. So this is what privatization looks like? A good etcher had plenty of work in those days.
The exhibit is worthwhile in its own merit. That it is also a funraising effort for the SF Unified School District elevates it further. I used this excuse to convince my wife to plunk down the $ 22 admission. We didn’t opt for the $ 5 audio tour, though I wish we had. The issuing of boarding passes to exhibit attendees is a nice touch.
My 3^rd-​class ass was grass.