Boston on the Frontier of the New

Urban Museum
by Anne D. Emerson

Anne Emerson was educated at Brown University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
and the Boston University School of Management. She is the president of the Boston Museum
Project, and past president of the Bostonian Society from 1998 to 2002. From 1988 to 1998,
she was executive director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard
University.

We know who we are and can share dreams for a

common future when our roots in the past are
strong.

Jill Ker Conway

Board Member, Boston Museum Project

The Boston Museum Project began in

Chicago twenty years ago at that city’s great
historical society in Lincoln Park. At that time,
when I stood in the society’s museum, it made me
realize that my own city, Boston, though 250 years
older than Chicago, had no real city museum
despite its remarkable historic sites, authentic
places of the early colony and the republic of the
United States.

The next decade of my career took me to

Harvard University where I worked for a time with
Robert Putnam who had just written Making
Democracy Work, a study of Italy as it devolved
its central government into sixteen regional
governments in 1971. Putnam studied the strength
of these regional governments by fielding teams of
researchers who tested the responsiveness of
different regional governments. They sent away for
driver’s licence applications, death certificates and

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TAKING A STANCE
the like. Their conclusion was that the
governments in the north of Italy were extremely
responsive; the governments in the south were not.
Taking their research to the next level they looked
at correlating factors in each society and found a
dense network of horizontal associations in the
north – choral societies, football leagues and the
like. In the south they found a vertically organized
society with a paternalistic approach. Historically,
the north was the place of tower societies watching
over their neighbours as they took their goods to
market and of the Medici family with its creation
of banking, based, of course, on societal trust.
The museum as a start up
As I encountered Robert Putnam’s research I
thought about my own city of Boston, settled by
many different immigrant groups, within which
there was much trust, but between which there was
little. I began to put together the idea of the
creation of a city museum rooted in history with
the idea of a museum that could be a social catalyst
deepening the horizontal trust relationships that
are so essential to a vital democracy. This is the
core of our concept. We hope to make it a reality.
The process of creating a major new
cultural institution as a start up in an American
context is one of developing a concept sufficiently
compelling that private individuals will support it
with their own funds. In our case, the Government
was supportive by giving us a prime site on the
new Rose Kennedy Greenway. It is not often that
a city has a chance to re-programme a major
section of its downtown area without a natural
disaster or war intervening. Boston had this chance
as a result of the removal of a major elevated
86 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
highway next to the waterfront. The ‘Big Dig’ has
opened up 30 acres (12 hectares) of prime
parkland. There the Boston Museum will be one of
two cultural projects that will draw local and
international visitors.
Much of my time has been spent in recent
years making the economic argument for the
Boston Museum. I point out to my varied
audiences that American museums average
865 million visits a year and that this number has
increased by 50 per cent in a decade. There are
approximately 16,000 museums in the United
States, and in the brief period between 1998 and
2000, $4.3 billion was spent to build or expand
150 museums in the United States. Here 81 per
cent of American travellers, or 118 million people,
are considered historic/cultural travellers. That
number has risen 13 per cent from 1996. Cultural
travellers spend more than other types of voyagers,
an average of $623 compared with $456 per trip
(excluding transportation). In Massachussetts,
tourism is the third largest industry with $13.3
billion spent in 2000. Moreover, museums are big
employers. It surprises many people that the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston employs 1,300
people. A final point, museums are key factors in
what is now being called the creative economy
index based on Richard Florida’s work.1 The index
is a cluster of factors that determine whether a city
is going to attract creative, professional people,
which turns out to be a key economic driver in the
local economy. Museums are very much at the core
of that attraction of creative talent because they
augment the quality of life.
There are many examples of the great
museum building boom that has taken place in the

15. The scenic view of the museum by architectural illustrator Costantino, based on the designs by architect Moshe Safdie.
United States. More than thirty major new
museums across the country have been created,
among them, the 400,000 square-foot (33,160 m2)
Minnesota History Museum and the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame, a tremendous new attraction on
the shorefront of Cleveland, Ohio. We might
also mention, in the same state, the National
Underground Railroad Freedom Center in
Cincinnati opened in 2004, and the architect
Moshe Safdie’s Exploration Place in Wichita,
Kansas, a stunning $62 million project, which is
now on the cover of the state’s tourist brochure. In
Minnesota, the new Science Museum and the new
Children’s Museum illustrate the energy of one
community to anchor its public spaces with
cultural institutions and enliven a cold, wintry
climate with destination attractions. In
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, $350 million have
been invested in the revitalization of Independence
Mall and the creation of the National Constitution
Boston on the Frontier of the New Urban Museum
Anne D. Emerson
ª Boston Museum Project
15
Center. All over America, we are seeing the
creation of new urban museums. I believe this is, in
part, because cultural institutions are becoming,
with the globalization of corporations and their
separation from place, the brand identities of cities
and are enormous economic drivers for their
communities. Much of the funding of these
institutions has come from private citizens.
Five years ago, the board of directors of the
Boston Museum Project began work on the
development of the key goals of this new
institution. We knew it needed to be a spectacular
educational facility that would have high impact
on the youth, enabling them to learn about the city
in which they lived. We knew it needed to be a
place of great interest and excitement for the entire
community, as well as for visitors from outside
Boston, and that it had to be a common meeting
ground for our own citizens. We knew it needed to
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TAKING A STANCE
bring visitors to Boston for its economic
development and tourism. In order to succeed, the
Boston Museum had to have significant scale, high
visibility and outstanding quality. It had to be a
partner-based service organization that would
strengthen all of our small historic sites in the city
of Boston.
More recent work has made it clear that
this institution will be a family-focused museum, a
place where visitors will be encouraged to leave
their contributions and have their voices heard and
recorded, a place that will touch their hearts as
well as their minds, that it will entertain through
interactive engagement. Lastly, we hope it will be a
place that will transform our understanding of the
region and the people who live here.
The Boston Museum Project challenges
In making our case, we have sought to outline the
challenges that face Boston. The first is that we
have a history gap. Literally, we are missing
200 years of history in the presentation of the city’s
story. The story of the American Revolution is an
exciting, uncontested story that brings visitors
from all over the world. The 200 years of history
subsequent to that, which are the years that all of
our immigrant populations can connect to their
own story, are much more difficult and are
essentially told nowhere. That gives us a rich arena
of stories to explore. One approach may be to
compare cities like Boston and San Francisco at a
given moment in time, say 1849, when San
Francisco was created in a single moment with the
Gold Rush. People of every colour and stripe
arrived simultaneously with one thought on their
minds: to get rich. At the same moment in Boston
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we were receiving thousands upon thousands of
impoverished Irish refugees from the potato famine
in Ireland. In a decade the city population
increased to four times what it had been fifty years
before. Bostonians turned inward, started private
clubs and began the layering of our civic society.
Today we have a culture in which our many tribes
live in parallel worlds. San Francisco is a city noted
for its tolerance and energetic pursuit of wealth.
Boston is noted for its entrepreneurial energy and
its difficulty in collaboration.
Another challenge we have as a city is that
it is extremely difficult for our residents and our
visitors to navigate; we need visitor facilities that
will help them do that. We have many small under-
funded historic sites that together do not make a
critical mass, nor do they tell a coherent story.
Therefore the creation of an institution that would
create an overall narrative framework for these
stories seems crucial. We have a severe lack of
public exhibition space in Boston, and yet we also
have many outstanding museum collections that
cannot be seen because of the lack of space. So the
Boston Museum will offer 8,000-square feet
(745 m2) of travelling exhibit space.
The city is made up of 53 per cent non-
white people. We need to make new places and
new ways to include their voices in our city
dialogue. Boston is traditionally a place of
considerable tribalism and strong neighbourhood-
based ethnic communities. Making these
communities visible to each other is the key goal of
this institution. In addition to focusing our exhibits
on these issues of contemporary significance, we
also plan to have a Dialogue Center, a non-
hierarchical space for community conversations,

comparable to the Wosk Centre for Public
Dialogue in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
The global concept of the Boston Museum
is to create a new front door for Boston. The
National Park Service has been an important
partner in the planning of this new institution, in
the funding site and transportation analyses, a
needs assessment of other historical institutions
and an economic impact study which together
assess the value of this new institution at
$40 million annually for the region.
The Boston Museum will be located at
Columbus Park. Moshe Safdie’s extraordinary
design for the Museum won this parcel of land,
which lies in the heart of the historic district and
adjacent to the Faneuil Hall Marketplace where
20 million visitors come annually. The site
consists of the air rights over the tunnel exit
ramps at this spot. Safdie’s design cleverly conceals
these ramps under a hillside park, which is the
roof-top of three levels of museum programme.
Above the park floats a glass-and-steel structure
(enclosing gallery spaces) that resembles the hull
of a ship. In addition there will be a passage
through the building to connect the parkland on
either side, all in a free zone so that the public, as
they traverse the structure, can use it as a street
passing through the gateway orientation centre.
The gallery spaces are focused on five major
themes: people, innovation, history, sports and
environment. There will be a futures lab to make
visible the many studies and databases that allow
us to see the trajectory on which our city is
moving. The education centre is comprised of a
model building studio, a situation room and a
series of labs and classrooms. In addition, there
Boston on the Frontier of the New Urban Museum
Anne D. Emerson
will be function rental spaces, public meeting
rooms, a large ‘town hall’ space and the Dialogue
Center mentioned above. Each of these has
revenue implications for the museum.
The Boston Museum Project invested
heavily in visitor research, co-ordinating 650
intercept interviews and five focus groups. The
results of these surveys indicate that 96 per cent of
our residents and 90 per cent of foreign visitors are
interested in visiting the museum. Both residents
and visitors thought that this would increase their
interest in learning about Boston’s history and
visiting other sites. This was a critical argument to
calm the fears of the existing tourist and historic-
sites markets: we would not steal their visitors, but
rather we would increase the number of people
interested in visiting Boston overall.
The timeline for our opening begins with
our capital campaign in 2007. We hope to break
ground in 2010 and open in two stages in 2012 and
2013. This depends very much on our ability to
make the case to private donors. We are fortunate
that the case is a good one, the place is ideal and
the need is great.
NOTES
1. Florida, Richard, The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, 2004, and
Cities and the Creative Class, Routledge, 2005.
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