The current building is too small toexhibit the collection and the lack of air-conditioned or climate-control puts its extensive, important collections at risk. Its directors are seeking $46 million from the Legislature.
Wouldn’t this make a lot more sense and raise more money if it were built on the waterfront?
Burke Director Julie Stein recognizes that this is a hard time to be asking for funds form the legislature.
“Well, we know this is a heavy lift,” she said. “But we are the Washington State Museum” — designated as such by an act of the Washington Legislature in 1899.
“We are the oldest museum in Washington, and we have a responsibility to serve the teachers and the agencies in the state.”
Her statements might surprise the people of Tacoma where there has been a successful effort to expand a cluster of museums, including a Washington State Historical Museum, as a tourist attraction. Worse the Tacoma museum is part of the UW effort to build a Tacoma campus.
Ms. Stein’s emphasis on the need to preserve the Burke’s diverse biological specimens and create a bigger space for working with the natural history collection, seems like a very hard sell and at conflict with the Burke’s own self designation as a Pacific Rim cultural museum. If I were a legislator I would be confused.
Worse, this comes at the same time as the effort to take advantage of the opportunity to build an entire new cultural center along the Seattle waterfront. It seems to me that the waterfront would be a far more effective home for the museums collections … especially if the goal is to create a Pacific Rim museum that could attract foreign tourists and investment.
• ABOUT 130,000 bird specimens, including tissue from 55,000 birds. That’s thought to be the third-largest in the world, behind Louisiana State University and the Field Museum in Chicago
• DNA SPECIMENS from 10,000 other animals, from reptiles to whales.
• 3 MILLION geology specimens, including 1 million fossils, rocks, minerals and meteorites.
• MORE THAN 50,000 ethnographic objects, including 7,500 baskets — 5,500 of Northwest origin. The Northwest Coast ethnographic collection, with more than 10,000 objects, is the fifth-largest in the U.S.
• ABOUT 100,000 people visit each year, including 35,000 school-age children. Another 70,000 view Burke objects as part of the museum’s traveling exhibits service.