Jim Henson’s Creature Shop opens for public tours in Queens
For $150, fans stepped inside a Queens workshop where puppet builders demonstrated the handwork behind Kermit, Miss Piggy and other icons.
Jim Henson’s Creature Shop has opened its doors to the public for the first time, turning a once-secret Queens workshop into a rare look at the hands, tools and artistry behind some of America’s most recognizable characters.
The 80-minute Saturday tours cost $150 per person and include photo opportunities, puppetry demonstrations and an up-close look at the work of the shop’s builders. Visitors can meet a puppet builder and see props and finished creations in a special room, while much of the workshop stays off-limits because pieces are still being built or are proprietary. The setup makes the experience feel less like a souvenir stop than a working studio visit, with the machinery of character-making still running just beyond the public path.
The tours began on Saturday, February 14, 2026, after an earlier limited-tour opportunity in October 2025 drew attention to the shop’s hidden world. The company later added dates through Saturday, September 26, 2026, with highlights that also include exclusive merchandise and archive items tied to Jim Henson’s upcoming 90th birthday. Jason Weber, the shop’s creative supervisor, framed the tours as a way to celebrate the expertise and labor behind the work, not as a pop-up store, but as a place where one-of-a-kind creations are made by artisans trained over years and decades.
The opening also places the Creature Shop in a larger American cultural history. Jim Henson created Kermit, Miss Piggy, Big Bird, Cookie Monster and the cast of Fraggle Rock, characters that shaped generations of children’s television and film. Henson began the workshop in Manhattan in the 1960s before it settled in Queens in 2009, and the company’s history materials describe the shop as a production house that supplies digital puppetry, animatronic creatures, animation and soft puppets for film, television, theater, live events and advertising.
That broader role helps explain why the tours matter beyond nostalgia. Henson died in 1990, and Disney now owns the Muppets, but the Creature Shop still represents a living tradition of physical craft in an industry increasingly shaped by screens and software. Opening the studio to the public lets visitors see that these characters are not just icons from the past. They are built, adjusted and brought to life by specialists whose work still carries weight in American entertainment.
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