Pollock’s Toy Museum

“If you love art, folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock’s,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in Memories and Portraits. If the Treasure Island author had lived just a century longer, he could easily have been describing Pollock’s Toy Museum instead of Benjamin Pollock, the Victorian toy theater maker from whom the museum takes its name. Plenty of toy theaters are on display, as well as teddy bears, dolls’ houses, and toys from different countries and eras. “The building on Scala Street occupies two houses joined together,” says Emily Dyson Paley. “The rooms are small and connected by narrow, winding staircases, and the whole place exudes atmosphere and nostalgia.”