More Museums Are Popping Up, Annoying Their Neighbors

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/business/museum-construction-resistance.html

Version 0 of 1.

Museums offer information, cultural awareness, a high-toned meeting place and personal enlightenment. But for the people who live or work near them, they can also bring noise and traffic congestion and can become a sinkhole for public money.

In 2014, there were about 35,000 museums in the United States, double the number in 1990, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington. And new ones continue to open, from the historical Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Ala., to the experiential Spyscape in New York.

But neighbors of proposed sites are pushing back out of concern over added headaches and diminished views. And city officials are becoming more resistant, fearing financial responsibility if a museum fails to reach its fund-raising goals or visitors and memberships lag, especially if the municipality issued bonds to help pay for the building.

People generally view museums as an improvement to a neighborhood, said Laura B. Roberts, a museum consultant in Cambridge, Mass. “They are clean, well-maintained operations that promise economic development and add status to the neighborhood,” she said.

But, she added, “the traffic and parking, sometimes the noise, tend to be the flash points, especially when a museum might be sited in a residential neighborhood.”

The backlash has been acute in Mount Pleasant, S.C., a suburb of Charleston. Developers of the proposed National Medal of Honor Museum there are hoping the Town Council will approve their building plan, but several Council members, as well as the mayor and some residents, have raised concerns.

The museum is planned for Patriots Point, a 350-acre park on Charleston Harbor, where the World War II-era aircraft carrier Yorktown is docked. But the original design, submitted by the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation, was rejected in January for exceeding the 50-foot height limit by 75 feet.

A redesign of the museum, with a height of 80 feet but somewhat wider, has been proposed by the foundation’s chief executive, Joseph Daniels, but initial antagonisms have not dissipated.

Residents have also complained about the design, said Will Haynie, Mount Pleasant’s mayor.

“The sentiment that I am hearing from many citizens is that the current design does not match the coastal city they live in,” he said. “Nor does it respect the skyline of Charleston Harbor.”

Some of the opposition stems from lifelong residents who view Mount Pleasant as “a small town,” said a Council member, Guang Ming Whitley, an intellectual property lawyer in Los Angeles who moved to Mount Pleasant with her family three years ago. “The ship has sailed on being a small town long ago,” she said.

In fact, Mount Pleasant is the fourth-largest city in the state, with a population of 86,668 in 2017, up from 47,609 in 2000, according to Census Bureau estimates.

Ms. Whitley was concerned that if the Medal of Honor Museum is granted a height variance, other developers will see it as a precedent for their own projects. “We need to narrowly craft the variance so that it only applies to the museum and not everyone else,” she said.

But a bigger worry is that the museum would give up on the town entirely. Mr. Daniels said the foundation’s board was re-evaluating Mount Pleasant as the site of the museum after facing “headwinds.”

“If Mount Pleasant or Charleston wants to put forward a proposal, we would certainly welcome it, but right now our confidence in the mayor and in Mount Pleasant itself is eroding,” he said.

The struggles of opposing opinions about the vision of a museum project are not new for Mr. Daniels, who was president and chief executive of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York until 2016.

The museum, which opened in 2014, was racked by sometimes bitter arguments among relatives of those who died, emergency medical workers, community members and political leaders. Squabbles arose over issues large, like financing and location, and small, including whether the gift shop should sell $40 key chains engraved with a quotation from the poet Virgil, “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”

“We were engaging and talking with stakeholders and hearing their input with various groups for nine straight years,” Mr. Daniels said.

Despite the animosity that can crop up in the planning stages, there is no resistance to museums in general, said John Gerner, managing director of Leisure Business Advisors, a consultant in Richmond, Va., that conducts feasibility and economic impact studies of museums, parks and zoos. “Museums tend to bring good feelings.”

But some residents, he added, believe that museum developers “take advantage of that good feeling” to obtain tax breaks and public financing that shifts the burden to them.

Museum developers are finding ways to overcome local opposition, however. The “Star Wars” filmmaker George Lucas tried for several years in different cities to find a home for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, tailoring the design for each site and pledging to finance the construction.

His first attempt, a planned Beaux-Arts style building in San Francisco’s Presidio Park, met staunch resistance. After four years of pushback, he offered to build the museum instead on undeveloped parkland between Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan in Chicago. But he met objections from a local preservation group and scrapped those plans.

Turning to Los Angeles with a new rendering, he finally won City Council approval for a five-story, 300,000-square-foot building in Exposition Park. Ground was broken in March for the museum, which was designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects in Beijing as a sleek, spaceshiplike building with underground parking and a rooftop garden.

The museum will feature Mr. Lucas’s a vast collection of 20th-century American book and magazine illustrations, including works by Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish, as well as photographs and memorabilia from Mr. Lucas’s movies.

Exposition Park already has a number of cultural and sports attractions, including Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, home to the University of Southern California football team; the California Science Center, which houses the space shuttle Endeavor; and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

“Exposition Park is a magnet for the region and accessible from all parts of the city,” the museum said on its website, citing its proximity to “more than 100 elementary and high schools, one of the country’s leading universities as well as three other world-class museums.”

Grouping museums together helps reduce the disturbance to the surrounding community, experts say. And the concept is starting to catch on.

For instance, the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, an Art Deco train station, has several attractions, including a history museum, a science museum and a children’s museum, as well as a giant-screen Omnimax Theater. And the Grout Museum District in Waterloo, Iowa, has a veterans’ museum, a history and science museum, a hands-on science “imaginarium” and two historic houses.

Other popular complexes are Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah; Balboa Park in San Diego; Newfields in Indianapolis; and Springfield Museums in Springfield, Mass.

“For people who are nervous about the impact of a new museum in terms of traffic and noise, putting a number of them all in one place tends to contain the problems and creates a zone of economic and cultural activity,” said Lisa Frehill, senior statistician at the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington.