Small history museums across the country are struggling to stay open; two in Baltimore are now slated to close Sept. 1. They're just not generating enough traffic.
The Civil War Museum and the Fells Point Maritime Museum are run by the Maryland Historical Society - and are victims of the parent organization's budget woes. We hope that financial angels will step up to keep these assets to Baltimore culture in business - but a solution to their problems will require some creative thinking and a little deep-pocketed nurturing.
A museum may be judged by the quality of its collection, but what counts is the number of tickets sold. A stand-alone museum with a few hundred square feet of exhibition space devoted to the Baltimore waterfront or the city's experience during the Civil War is not going to attract many visitors - especially repeat visitors - without serious marketing, regular exhibit changes, special programs and a big enough staff to have more than one person on site at a time.
The Civil War Museum, for instance, occupies the old President Street train station - a historic 1850 building, but so shorn of its railroading context that it has little sense of place. The exhibit is 10 years old, and wordy. Last year, just 12,000 people stopped by.
The director of the B&O; Railroad Museum, Courtney Wilson, has expressed a strong interest in taking it over - maybe not surprisingly, as he designed the display there when it opened. He says that with the backing of the bigger railroad museum, it could become a livelier and more sustainable satellite operation. But he also says the city will have to commit to maintaining the station.
Equally cramped, the Maritime Museum reports that fewer than 25 percent of the people who walk in the front door make it any farther than the gift shop. The paid annual attendance of less than 4,000 is so small, says Rob Rogers, director of the Historical Society, that the opening of the nearby Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park in 2006 seemed to have little effect.
The Historical Society intends to remove the artifacts and ship models on display to create a bigger maritime section at its Mount Vernon campus. A former Thames Street stable owned by the Preservation Society in Fells Point, the building could end up with the Living Classrooms Foundation (which runs the Douglass-Myers Maritime Park) or the National Park Service, both of which say they might be interested, and both of which would be worthy tenants - but there have been feelers from restaurant and bar owners, too.
These are not the only small Baltimore museums in a pinch, even as more and more have opened. Some, trying to operate without an endowment, are reliant on contributions. All add something to the life of the city - but a museum without a realistic business plan is not a museum with a future.