I was intrigued by a travel guide to the Hudson River Valley that had this surprising entry: “You pass this on your way to Caramoor and it looks interesting. It’s not, really. The home of John Jay, our first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, it descended through his family through four generations and offers some basically mediocre period furnishings and a rather bizarre ballroom added in this century. Unless you are a John Jay fanatic or a distant relative of the family, this is something you can afford to miss.”

It is the Hudson River Valley, which is crowded with nature and culture, after all.

The guide goes on to share, in a paranthetic paragraph, the letter from someone chiding his dismissive description and noting that the house tells of a great man and also has a Gilbert Stuart and a John Singer Sargent. The author included the critical comment – and did not comment further. So who was right? There is certainly an audience for every house museum. The only question is how big an audience?

There are 11,000 Starbucks in the United States and 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants. Together, that is 10,000 less than the number of museums in the country, which is 35,000. Each Starbucks and McDonald’s has to turn a profit or it will be closed. While the same cold economic logic stands behind each museum, it is deflected by the noble desire to educate and enlighten an audience.

Every story is worth telling. Not every story can be told by an asset that requires $100,000 a year.

The economics of museums can be deflected for years and decades by generous donors or excellent programs or, mostly, by big endowments. The economics of museums, especially house museums, are poor at best, as I have written about here last year and here in 2012 and here in 2008. But the real question of the travel writer above is interpretive – he is basically arguing that other sites have better stories, better artifacts, better architecture.

It’s the Hudson Valley, c’mon! Look at the competition!

There is a problem of too many house museums and there always has been. The problem is not a lack of resources or the depredations of consumer capitalism. The problem is a lack of imagination. If you come across a wonderful old house with a wonderful old story, what is the LEAST imaginative way to save it? Turn it into a house museum. It requires no thought, no creative solution.

But I know the name of that soup tureen! And where to put the fork!

I have taught Preservation Planning for thirty years and my final assignment always asks students to come up with an adaptive re-use of a historic property that would allow it to survive into the future. The only caveat? It can’t be a house museum or a community center.

Damn that’s cold.

Not because those are bad things – they are wonderful things. But they require no thought or imagination. And preservation needs imagination.

Oficina de abogado o dentista, por ejemplo…..

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