How We Gonna Pay?

Eric O'Keefe's New York Times article, "Auctioning the Old West to Help a City in the East" reports a unique effort to raise money for Harrisburg, PA. The city's mayor worked to develop an impressive collection of Old West artifacts to open a new museum. However, due to budgetary dilemmas, he helped create an auction to sell the artifacts and fundraise for Harrisburg. It seems ironic to me that while museums have extraordinary difficulties finding financial resources, the value of their exhibits can assist a state capitol.

In "The End of History Museums, Part B," Cary Carson addresses some of the financial difficulties of museums and how various sites have addressed these problems. Carson notes that attendance at history museums has dropped drastically in recent years, depriving these museums of a primary source of income. In order to combat this, many museums have taken a proactive stance by expanding educational programs, creating visitor centers, and renting their facilities for private affairs.

Carson is extremely critical of the latter effort. He believes that the focus of history museums should be the history, not a staged event. I disagree with this perspective for two main reasons: First, the continued operation of a museum must be the primary concern of its administration and, if an event can help the museum without hurting its mission, the benefits outweigh the costs. Second, even if the historical aspect of a museum is relegated to a "sideshow" for a non-historical event, the ultimate message of bringing history to the public is still accomplished. Even in a museum's purest state, it is unrealistic to attempt to control all of the circumstances involved in a guest's experience. Ultimately, the efforts for a museum to be an event site as well as a historical site provides at least a short-term resolution to pressing financial concerns.

Even as we look at how museums need assistance from their communities, it is equally important to historically examine the communities in which they exist. Nancy Raquel Mirabal writes in "Geographies of Displacement: Latina/o's, Oral History, and The Gentrification of San Fransisco's Mission District" that economic progress in San Fransisco has rubbed out the historic and cultural roots of certain parts of the city. She hails the attempts of historians to recapture the story of the mission district by interviewing its former inhabitants and tracing the changes that have occurred in the space that they once called home. This is an extraordinary endeavor that deserves acknowledgment and imitation in similarly evolving urban areas. It demonstrates that financial success can be as damaging as financial distress.

From fundraisers and developments to ticket prices and paying the rent, it looks like even the most idealistic of public historians will never be free of the money woes.