One of SF's first big Instagram-trap "museums," the Museum of Ice Cream, has scooped its last scoop and swept up its last plastic sprinkle.
The interactive attraction, best known for its sprinkle pool, closed its SF location at the start of the pandemic and never reopened, and its New York-based owners confirmed the closure via — where else? — Instagram late last week. The SF Business Times first reported the news, noting that signage on the Savings Union Bank building at 1 Grant Street came down in the last week.
Like some other Instagram traps and "selfie factories" before and after it, the MOIC was relatively popular and light on substance. The New York museum lives on, and the creators recently announced upcoming iterations in Austin and Singapore.
The MOIC opened in San Francisco in 2017 to a fair bit of fanfare, about a year after its ridiculously popular New York debut. The first batch of tickets for the SF iteration sold out in less than 90 minutes. In the spring of 2019, the SF museum did a sort of relaunch with something they called the "Sprinkle Spectacular," adding some sort of theatrical element to the experience.
Founder Maryellis Bunn, who was 25 at the time, famously gave an interview to New York Magazine in 2017 in which she said that she aspired to be "the next Disney," and she would love to "host the inaugural party on Mars." She also derided traditional museum culture, and said of her fellow young Millennials, "Our generation doesn’t want to spend six hours doing anything."
The SF museum had hoped to get a license to sell beer and wine, and wanted to host a complementary bar at the end of tours called the "Dive-In" — presumably adjacent to the sprinkle pool. But the SF Board of Supervisors denied that bid after two attempts.
The Chronicle's John King has posted an appropriately withering mini-obit for the place.
In positive news, we won't have anymore of those plastic sprinkles ending up in the ocean.