Aircraft on Display, Cameras in Wristwatches, Women on Horses, Nicks in Bats, and Blacks in Wax
By Kevin Moffett

The Cradle of Aviation Museum
Mitchell Field, N.Y.
Opened in 2002
Fact: After decades of deliberation,
the Cradle of Aviation Museum is
finally open, debuting a SimEx!Iwerks simulator for 2003.

Last year in May, exactly 75 years after Charles Lindbergh took off from the Roosevelt Field in Long Island bound for Paris, the $100 million Cradle of Aviation Museum officially opened its doors. During the interim was a lengthy struggle, with more than two decades of false starts, near bankruptcies, and political maneuvering. The finished facility—enabled in part by $40 million in municipal bonds raised by Nassau County—houses 73 airplanes and spacecraft, restored by volunteers who spent an estimated 650,000 hours working to bring Long Island’s aeronautical heritage to light.

The museum occupies two hangars in Mitchel Field, N.Y., formerly a major military center and national hub of air- and spacecraft manufacturing. From World War I on, aeronautical companies Grumman and Republic-Fairchild were headquartered there, developing aircraft like the Wildcat, the Hellcat, and the Avenger torpedo bomber. Tom Gwynne, vice president of external relations for the museum, says that almost all the displayed artifacts at the Cradle of Aviation were designed, built, and flown on Long Island.

So far, the the museum has garnered much interest from its surrounding area, particularly with school groups, and as a result of write-ups in New York Newsday and the New York Times. “We’ve had 120,000 visitors since we opened on May 20,” says Gwynne. “We’re really pleased with that visitor rate.”

The 130,000-square-foot museum also boasts the only domed IMAX theater in the New York City metropolitan area, a seven-story-tall building currently showing The Magic of Flight and Space Station. In January, the museum announced the addition of Mars, a simulator ride designed by SimEx!Iwerks, which has provided attractions for Silver Dollar City and Warner Bros. Movie World in Madrid. Guests buckle into a 30-seat shuttle simulator and embark on a simulated rescue mission to Mars. The crew must brave meteor showers and blackouts during their mission, as they shoot past the sun to bring fuel to a newly
colonized Mars.

“The addition of the simulator is particularly attractive because it enables children to come in and see not only historical artifacts, but also where they fit into the whole scheme of things. We’re very happy with it because it represents a look forward,” says Gwynne.

Gwynne is also excited about the educational opportunities for teachers to use both the IMAX theater and shuttle simulator in their lesson plans. Each attraction has its own teacher’s guide, available on the museum’s web site, giving educators the opportunity to incorporate the museum experience into their lessons.

With the trio of attractions, the Cradle of Aviation Museum is offering a combination simulator-theater-museum entrance fee ($16.50 for adults, $12.50 for children and school groups), which Gwynne says most patrons are taking advantage of.

International Spy Museum
Washington, D.C
Opened in 2002
Fact: A display at the Spy Museum shows how pigeons equipped with cameras gathered information behind enemy lines during World War I.

The intelligence is in: It’s been a banner year for the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. Since its grand opening on July 19, 2002, it has garnered a surprising amount of interest, both from the press and from would-be patrons, and has exceeded all first-year expectations.

“Our attendance is well above projections,” says Jennifer Saxon, a spokesperson for the museum. “We had planned on about 500,000 for the first year and by mid-January we had more than 300,000 visitors.”

“We’re the only new attraction that opened in Washington, D.C., last summer,” she adds.

The $40 million facility, privately owned and created by the same folks who built the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, houses a vast display of cloak-and-dagger paraphernalia—items ranging from “tiger dung” transmitters, used to dispatch locations during the Vietnam War, to lipstick guns and exploding tree stumps.

The museum’s mission, according to Saxon, is to “lift the veil off espionage so people can tell what goes on in real-life intelligence.”

The bulk of the museum’s collection is taken from the real-world spy business, with some pop culture curios thrown in. There are the Enigma, a decoding machine used during WWII that looks like a double typewriter, shoe switchblades, and an interactive alias generator, where guests choose identities and must answer questions about their pseudo-selves to sneak past a snooping computer guard at the end. There are also a pair of restaurants and a gift shop.
With all of the publicity and word-of-mouth advertising that the museum generates, it has been able to scale down its advertising campaign in an effort to reduce queues.

National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame
Fort Worth, Texas
Opened in 2002
Fact: Sandra Day O’Connor, the United States’s first female Supreme Court justice and a recent inductee into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, attended the museum’s ribbon-cutting ceremony in June.

Last year, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame quit its lonesome rambling and settled down in Fort Worth, Texas. Its new $21 million facility, in the center of Fort Worth’s cultural district, celebrates the pioneering spirit of women in the American West, as Susan Fine, director of development and marketing for the museum, describes as “doing what needs to be done.”

Founded in 1975 in Hereford, Texas, the museum had been without a home since moving to Fort Worth in 1994 (its collection was in storage), while it solicited contributions for a new facility. “We were very fortunate,” says Fine. “We were able to raise all donations from private individuals and institutions.”

The new building is impressive—33,000 square feet of space house the museum’s 2,000 artifacts, research library, interactive and educational exhibits, gift shop, and 54-seat multipurpose theater. Names of Hall of Fame inductees, who include Laura Ingalls Wilder, Georgia O’Keefe, Sacajawea, and Sandra Day O’Connor, shine on stars across the rotunda walls, next to which hang shifting, glass-tiled murals.

According to Fine, “It’s going to take two to three years to stabilize and understand what our attendance should be.” Community officials have speculated that the museum, which is open year-round, could draw as many as 300,000 visitors annually, in part because of its prime location near four other museums, including the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History and the Amon Carter Museum.

“We’ve had a lot of international interest, including Germany, England, France, Japan, and Scotland, which has been nice,” Fine says.

Louisville Slugger Museum
Louisville, Ky.
Opened in 1996
Fact: Since its opening, the Louisville Slugger Museum has been visited by two U.S. presidents and two U.S. senators.

Back in 1884, John A. “Bud” Hillerich sanded down his first wooden baseball bat for Pete “The Old Gladiator” Browning, a player for the Louisville Eclipse. More than 100 years later, Louisville Slugger, the company he founded, is still going strong. Eight blocks from where Bud Hillerich made his first bat, the company operates a museum and factory tour that showcase a century of baseball and baseball bat manufacturing.

The museum, opened in 1996, is one of the oldest examples of the now widespread type of museums: corporate brandlands. But don’t look for a sales pitch at the Louisville Slugger Museum. Anne Jewell, a museum spokesperson, says the facility strives to be informative and entertaining first and foremost.

“When we opened in 1996, we felt that there weren’t a lot of models for being a corporate museum,” she says. “The folks who planned it really made a conscious effort not to be in-your-face with the commercial aspects,” and she adds, pardoning the pun, “We try not to hit people over the head.”

The $3 million, 14,000-square-foot museum draws about 180,000 visitors a year and is operated by the Hillerich & Bradsby Company, which has remained in the Hillerich

family over the years. Visitors will notice a definite focus on the art of hitting, signaled at the front entrance by the world’s largest bat, which looms high over the museum. Inside, visitors will find plenty of interactive exhibits and reproductions, including a batting cage that delivers up 90 mph fastballs, as well as a wall of bat signatures (Ken Griffey Jr., Joe DiMaggio), a short film, tons of facts telling baseball’s story, and one of the museum’s crown jewels, Babe Ruth’s bat, in which he carved a notch for every home run he hit.

Admission to the museum and factory tour, where visitors get a look at how white ash is turned into a baseball bat, is $6—not a bad deal, especially when you consider that everyone gets a souvenir miniature bat to take home.

According to Jewell, “We don’t necessarily have a commercially driven mission. Our overall philosophy here is, ‘Hey, let’s give visitors a good time.’

Great Blacks in Wax Museum
Baltimore, Md.
Opened in 1983
Fact: Great Blacks In Wax has on display figures of Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rosa Parks, both of whom have visited the museum.

One of United States’s most worthy and disconcerting museums, Baltimore’s Great Blacks in Wax, is undergoing a renovation. It’s part of the city’s $50 million revitalization project in its Inner Harbor, one that will see the new Reginald S. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture open in 2004 near the city’s old slave port site. The new museum will be the second-largest facility of its kind and will have permanent and traveling exhibitions.

For 20 years, the Great Blacks in Wax Museum has taken an unblinking approach to teaching the history and culture of African Americans, thorns and all. It was founded by Joanne Martin, Ph.D., and her late husband, Elmer Martin, Ph.D., who, with their vast knowledge of African American history and culture, wanted to provide an educational facility that would also serve as a beneficial addition to their East Baltimore neighborhood. With the help of federal, state, and local grants, private donations, and fund-raisers, the Martins’s museum has grown from a small house containing 20 or so wax figures to a 30,000-square-foot, internationally renowned facility.

The museum, which attracts more than 300,000 people a year, still houses wax replicas of notable African American figures like Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman. It has added an array of historical exhibits, which give accurate, unsettling depictions of the slave passage, slave rebellions, lynchings, whippings, and Jim Crow Era, as well as strides made in contemporary race relations. Wax displays are accompanied by lengthy narratives, which are often accounts from the participants themselves.

“This museum is designed to give [children] some kind of context for their lives today and what the struggles of the past have to do with that,” Martin says. “The museum adds a visual impact to history. If you put a wax figure across the room, people will gravitate toward it.”

Great Blacks in Wax recently received a grant from Hewlett-Packard, part of a $5 million Empowerment Zone award, which will allow it to offer computers and computer training. Together with East Baltimore’s Chance program, it will provide job training to the community. Other plans include expanded parking, building renovations, and landscaping.

“We want visitors and our neighbors to see beauty when they look around the museum,” says Martin.

The Last Word . . .
There seems to be a consensus, both within and outside the museum business, that a worldwide museum-building boom is currently under way. This month, the $160 million Asian Art Museum opens in San Francisco. In Washington, the much-anticipated Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian is slated to debut next year.

The bulk of museums, however, at least in the United States, are far more arcane and humble in their offerings. For every Norwegian Aviation Museum there’s a Paper Airplane Museum (Kahului, Hawaii); for every Graceland, there’s a Graceland Too (a mammoth collection of Elvis memorabilia on display in Tupelo, Miss., in the two-story house of father and son Elvis impersonators). For years, these little-known highway oddities have been making road-weary motorists do a double take.

Some of our favorites:

• Parking Meter Museum, Russellville, Ark.
• The Banana Museum, Altadena, Calif.
• Lou’s Living Doughnut Museum, San Jose, Calif.
• Trash Museum, Hartford, Conn.
• Squished Penny Museum, Washington, D.C.
• Bowling Ball Art Museum, Safety Harbor, Fla.
• Philip Robinson Fruit Jar Museum, Muncie, Ind.
• Museum of Bad Art, Dedham, Mass.
• Museum of Family Camping, Allenstown, N.H.
• Vacuum Cleaner Museum, North Canton, Ohio