ALBANY — Criticizing the state of New York’s State Museum earned me a tour with its director, who told me as we walked the galleries that an upcoming renovation will result in “a dramatic difference” and a remade visitor experience.
“It’s going to be a new New York State Museum,” Mark Schaming said.
Terrific! But we’ve heard that before.
As I wrote for last weekend’s column, Schaming in 2015 told us that the museum would be dramatically remade yet the only visible change is the continuing decline of a beloved Albany institution. What happened to that promise made eight years ago?
Turns out, I was being generous. As an employee of the museum subsequently pointed out, a master plan for remaking the galleries was completed and touted in 2008. Worse, museum leadership also announced a $70 million renovation way back in 1999 as a response to worries about declining attendance and the building’s dated appearance.
“The public face of the museum has not been the face that the collection and the staff and the history of the museum deserve,” Carol Huxley, then the state’s deputy commissioner of cultural education, said at the time.
Yikes. I’m no mathematician, but by my calculations those words were uttered 24 years ago — and yet we’re still waiting for that facelift. Even if we accept that state government moves at a lumbering pace, this is ridiculous. It took nine years to build the entirety of Empire State Plaza.
In that 2015 announcement, Schaming said an ambitious and exciting renovation master plan was done and the museum’s remake would be completed by decade’s end. When I asked him about that prediction during my amiable if occasionally awkward tour Thursday, he conceded it was overly ambitious given the complexity of the changes and the bureaucracy involved.
“It was a bigger project than we anticipated,” said Schaming, who became the museum’s director in…
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