An Overdue Update on Little Brick Township

Fans of my LEGO town, Little Brick Township, have been asking me for an update for months. A while ago, I opened up more space under the table on which the main part of the township is located. I didn’t have enough space for new buildings on that table without taking away the two parks that my Bricksters love, and I didn’t have room in my New York City apartment for a new table. So the latest buildings are going in under the table. I’m not sure how that works for the buildings with telescopes, but fiction generally requires a certain suspension of disbelief.

Little Brick Township in March 2024. Note the new buildings under the table.

My latest building is the modular Natural History Museum, which came out in December 2023. Usually the modular buildings first appear on New Year’s Day, and one of my old traditions was going to the LEGO Store in Flatiron with a dolly to pick mine up. It’s believed that this year’s model appeared early because of the glut of expensive sets in January 2024 that would have made the museum harder to stand out.

Natural History Museum and Jazz Club, with plans for a botanical garden next.

The gaming truck has made a stop in Little Brick Township Underground.

I’ve been collecting modular sets (and building my own creations and modifications to supplement them) since 2007, and I’ve noticed a huge increase in interior detail. In recent years, The LEGO Group has been adding stories to the buildings. I had been doing so long before the LEGO people jumped into this, and at one point storyboarded one of their smaller sets/books combos. Since I prefer to add my own stories to Little Brick Township, I modify my buildings and interiors so my stories work better. I’ve also been known to include scenes from my books and manuscripts as well as depicting scenes in other people’s books or in movies.

A new diner for the Bricksters, convenient to the construction site.

For the Natural History Museum, The LEGO Group’s story involves an unruly French bulldog that swipes a dinosaur bone and runs through the museum with it, causing a prehistoric bowl to fall from its display and break. I’m a little concerned about the museum’s lack of security and their openness to giving poorly trained therapy dogs free run of the place. Nonetheless, the theme of museum-goers gone wild appears in my story as well. Shortly before acquiring the modular set, I ordered some unusual minifigure elements through Pick-a-Brick, which allowed me to create an elementary school classroom on a field trip with one teacher and the parent of one of the boys as chaperones. (The parent chaperone, a mom with a prosthetic leg, and her son are two of the minifigures that come with the actual set.)

The curator arrives to restore order.

While the boys quietly enjoy the upstairs space exhibit while Chaperone Mom takes pictures, the girls on the ground floor are going wild, running around and giving their young red-headed teacher a migraine. I can sympathize, because when I was a rookie teacher, I couldn’t control the class either. Fortunately, no ancient ceramics have been broken — the display has an intact pot and the shards are also part of the exhibit — but the disturbance has attracted the attention of the museum curator, who has rushed down the stairs from his rooftop office to help wrangle the girls.

It’s a raid on the curator’s office! Sneaky Veronica!

The girls, however, are wily! Girls Gone Wild is a set-up, distraction for Veronica to slip upstairs unnoticed and into the curator’s office, where she is reading his mail and novel in progress and has swiped one of his awards. He’s not getting any new awards either, thanks to the mayhem.

If you invite me to your school or library for a virtual visit, your students will get to see the most updated version of Little Brick Township. It has certainly been a conversation piece! On the other hand, if you feel this background is too distracting for your students, let me know, and I can find another location for the presentation or use a neutral background.