Things to Do in Allen Park

Part dance party, part costume bash, and all spectacle, The Haunted Kingdom sprawls across 65,000 square feet. DJs, fortunetellers, and local celebrities shamble about an eye-defying dance floor flush with thousands of revelers dressed in their best getups. Lights pulse to body-shaking bass as silk dancers twist like spiders from the ceiling above dramatically lit skeletons. For this year’s spectacular, the organizers aim hard to break the Guinness world record for largest Halloween event.

On November 19, 1928, the Detroit Historical Society opened the Detroit Historical Museum in a one-room suite on the 23rd floor of the Barlum Tower, earning it the nickname of highest museum in the world. These days, Detroit’s Cultural Center accommodates the museum in an 80,000-square-foot space, where interactive exhibits preserve more than 300 years of city history. Frontiers to Factories traces Detroit's transformation from French-frontier outpost to industrial city, while America's Motor City celebrates its automotive dominance with a changing display of classic vehicles and a 1903 Model T that guests can sit in. Streets of Old Detroit brings the 19th century to life with recreated cobblestone streets that wind past stores of the era such as a five-and-dime, a soda shop, and a barbershop for powdered wigs.

Thanks to recent renovations, the society has expanded its chronicle of Detroit with three new permanent exhibitions. Detroit: The Arsenal of Democracy covers the ways the city's industrial infrastructure adapted to demands of World War II, and The Gallery of Innovation includes videos about renown innovators and hands-on activities of trial-and-error. As The Allesee Gallery of Culture examines the city's cultural history, its Kid Rock Music Lab lets visitors create and share their own music using interactive displays. Outside, the Detroit Legends Plaza honors the city's sports, entertainment, and media legends with cemented handprints and signatures from stars such as Lily Tomlin and Martha Reeves.

Pottery Creations allows children and grownups to bring out their creative sides through the art of painting on three-dimensional ceramic canvases. You can use the Groupon for the studio's firing fee ($5 for kids, $8 for adults) and put the rest toward one of more than 100 clay canvases, with items ranging from cups and picture frames to piggy banks and bowls shaped like bunnies ($6 to $40 each). An assortment of tools allows you to daub a pot with a sponge, stencil your surname on a serving tray, or trace your vestigial tail onto an ornament. Parents appreciate Pottery Creations' patient, easygoing staff, who permit food and drink and rarely cry over spilt pigments. Upon your masterwork's completion, they'll fire the piece, let it cool, and dust away its exoskeleton before making the handiwork available for pick-up about a week later.

Home to the state's largest freestanding bouldering island, New Jersey Rock Gym houses 12,000 square feet of vertical terrain to climb as well as 41 top roping stations. Armed with either day passes or membership, guests scamper up the gym's synthetic summits, hoping to ask questions of the learned ceiling light sequestered at the top of the mountain. While gear is included with some membership options, guests can opt to bring their own materials or rent the individual shoes ($5), harnesses ($4), or chalk bags ($2) they need from the pro shop. New Jersey Rock Gym offers a collection of educational course work in the vertical arts, teaching belay technique to beginners or advanced skills to adults. Children can also take advantage of youth climbing programs, mini camps, and birthday parties before retiring to private refreshment chambers to absorb bottles of electrolyte-infused refreshment. The nearby pro shop outfits climbers with name-brand gear for purchase, while a WiFi lounge transmits terabytes of data into nearby electronic devices or unsecured cyborg brains.

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s gifted tunesmiths squeeze euphonious notes through their woodwind, brass, string, and percussion instruments, building upon a 125-year history of symphonic sounds in the Motor City. The orchestra's performance of Franck's Symphony in D Minor pollinates the air with soaring French classics, swaying back and forth to the baton semaphoring of guest conductor Hélène Bouchez and the piano mastery of 17-year old prodigy Conrad Tao. A pair of Debussy compositions inaugurates the evening with ear-swooning melodies that bounce of the antique theater's ornate, golden structure, which was built in 1919. During the evening’s main and final piece, Franck's Symphony in D Minor, Chinese-American Conrad Tao showcases his full repertoire, which has earned him ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer award for eight consecutive years, just two notches shy of earning him a free carrying case for a grand piano.

Through public science forums and more than 200 interactive exhibits, Canada South Science City hopes to foster an excitement for science that helps families understand their relationship to the universe and inspire children to work towards Science-based careers. The 30,000-square-foot facility houses attractions such as Dinosaur Alley, where a model T-Rex skeleton looms as kids dig for prehistoric bones and fossilized cassette tapes. Live snakes, turtles, and tree frogs send a symphony of hisses and warbles from the Big Lagoon, an exhibit that offers up fun facts about biodiversity. Elsewhere, models of Jupiter and Saturn overhang an open-gym area that demonstrates the properties of sound and space.

Canada South Science City also hosts special events including science panel discussions and educational programs for students. These include workshops that challenge kids to solve problems, such as keeping a dropped egg from breaking or a black hole from opening in their lunchbox.