The-Ave.US

Nordic Heritage Museum receives $4 million grant from the olde country.

Shane Harms reports that the effort to build a Nordic Heriage museum in Ballard, is getting help form Denmark!

The Nordic Heritage Museum  has received a $4 million dollar  grant from  the A.P. Møller and Chastine Mc-Kinney Møller Foundation, which brings them to within $5 milon of the $44.6 million needed to build a new museum facility on N.W. Market Street in Ballard. Once known as “Scandhoovia” for its indigenous people, the fisher folk from Norway. 

Of course this firs with the monument in Seattle to the man who discovered this place, Leif Erickson.  I often wonder whether the statue of the Discoverer ever takes a walk late at night (or maybe an Uber) to talk with the pigeon shit covered statue of Chef Seattle found under the elevated train in an obscure intersection in downtown Seattle?

Snark and racism aside, maybe someone should note that Ballard is no longer the home of the fisher folk.  The new tribe, the Zonians, craft code rather than repair nets.

Moreover,   Seattle already has its struggling and somewhat pathetic museum of History and Industry.  Like other Seattle ethnic museums (for example the African American History Museum) this Nordic  place (not yet built) will soon be an anachronism as our ethnic mix changes to reflect Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Ironically, even King County has “donated”  $1 million grant to this noble cause, apparently out of the tax money left over from building another anachronism, the King Dome.

Construction of the new building at Market Street starts later this year with an anticipated opening in early 2018. READMORE