Museum of Natural Sciences

This week we visited the Museum of Natural Sciences as part of our last museum visit for this class. I think it was one of the more interesting museums but we did not really get to see any of it. We spent a total of ten minutes in the last exhibit and were toured around the rest of the time to be shown museum setup logistics. Normally operations and logistics of any company is interesting to me but they just had to make this down right boring. Our very nice tour guides were great and I thanked them for their time, but I do not need know what type of glass they use for the eyes or what types of fake and real materials they use in the exhibit. And that was pretty much 90% of the tour. I did benefit from the new found knowledge of museums sub contracting out exhibits to firms, that is not only efficient for museums but better for the economy, allowing for profit companies to produce rather than government subsidized non-profit companies producing less efficiently for themselves. I really liked that aspect of their operations. But it's a shame that was only a 5 minute conversation in the 2 hour presentation about how dioramas are made which does not benefit anyone in the room unless you are looking to make dioramas one day.  I also really wish I could of read and looked at the exhibits rather than getting whisked to the basement dungeon to look at how to assemble these exhibits. I thought we were going to be taking in nature and science, not taxidermy and boredom. But I still think it was nice that they gave their time to give us a tour and they seemed happy about it.   I will say this, at the end of the day that place is run pretty efficiently I love the idea of all the sub contracted exhibits and the PT consultants. Here is where they lacked. Too much collaborative-ism. If everyone has a say production is always going to be inefficient. They needed more focus and a division of labor. I am not sure who there manager is but they could use a more hands on manager to focus their team and divide up their time. Collaborative-ism is not always good, and when the goal at hand is straight forward (i.e. designing a diorama that has accurate scenery) being collaborative is no good. The diorama has to be accurate, not creative and new age so all this time spent being collaborative on creativity is a waste of time.  And I'm sure none of these people think that way. Which I am slowly learning is.......ok.

The Constitution Center

Our visit to the constitution center was an interesting one. As part of our visit, we were supposed to address a simple question. Why is the Constitution Center  so much more popular than other museums we have visited? Unfortunately because of three 10 page papers due in next 10 days and piles of HW from my 3 other Economics classes and my one other CLA class, I need to hold off  until later in the week to in-depthly answer this question.
thank you
White Leon

Eastern State Penitentiary - Break that shit down yo

My visit to the Eastern State Penitentiary was an interesting one to say the least. I  gained insight on prison reform issues of the 1800’s which are still issues in our prison system today. It was nice to see the transition the prison took on from a place of repentance, solitude, and self improvement, to a place of punishment.

The facts were interesting; 2^nd most expensive government funded facility in the nation and the first penitentiary in the nation. Apparently in the 1800’s people came from all over the world to see this prison and its ideologies played out.  It’s pretty cool to think that such a historic site is in Philadelphia and we pass the building everyday not knowing some of the most interesting aspects of it.

Something I overlooked in my paper pertaining to haunted houses being a part of museum programming is the fact that after people visit the haunted house, it inspires them to see the museum at a later date. Even though the number of those return day visitors is minimal, it is still something, and I would like to see some statistics on those return visitors.

 After all that being said, I still hold true to my original idea; make money where there is money to be made even at the cost of compromising your true mission.  Our tour guide said that this museum would not exist without the haunted house revenues.

Because its owned by the city, I would like to see the sites quarry stone demolished and sold (it’s a lot of reusable stone). I would then like to see half of the land sold to various developers for condos, restaurants, and local businesses, then the other half used at a multi-level turn key paid parking structure owned by the city selling monthly parking and regular parking at  discounted rates. This would be beneficial for everyone for many reasons. That area (like manayunk) has a lot of nightlife businesses but not enough parking  which discourages out of towners from driving down to get drunk, spend their money, and get DUI’s (more city money).  If we could increase access to public parking at a discounted rate more people would flock to that area at night increasing the demand for renters and increasing property values for landowners. Also the increase in access to parking would increase rents and property equity for both COMMERCIAL and residential landlords alike. Now here is the best part, you are not cutting the competitions profits because there are no large privately owned parking lots in that area.  The goal of the city is to increase GDP growth and increase business sustainability, normally if the city is selling a product of any type at an extremely discounted rate it will completely shutout the competition. Luckily in this case, there are no large public parking lots for blocks in that area.  Also parking lots are insanely profitable in the city. 70% of them are owned by one guy. Its time for someone to brake up his oligopoly and his strong hold on fixing parking prices in the city. As far as owning a parking lot, your biggest cost by far is taxes and if your owned by the city you are not really paying  city property taxes. Parking structures have also become completely automated so by implementing the latest technologies, at most you need 1 maintenance guy working there during the day and that’s it. 

In conclusion, if you shutdown Eastern State and do what I just said, you can now take that sink hole which I am sure is being leased at a very discounted rate to a historical society that is not paying property taxes, and break it in half, make a huge (tens of millions of dollars) profit on the sale of half of the land then continue to tax the land owners for the next thousand years, while also making ongoing hefty profits with the city owned parking garage. Over the long run as property values increase the amount the property owners in the area are getting taxed increases as well, the residual profits for the city after completion of these projects could be upwards of 75 million dollars with 10 years. These are real numbers....  Do it!

  

The Powell House Review

I had an interesting visit at the Powell House which I now must comment on. Somewhere in this document I have to answer the question "Does Philadelphia need another house museum?". The Powell House had less than 3,000 visitors last year and they operate paying a site manager, curator, coordinator, and an administrator or two, most of which I am sure they allocate the duties of the two other museums that the Landmarks Organization owns and runs. At least that would make the most sense.  I feel that I need the proper information before I decide to slice and dice the financial inefficiencies of this organization like the logical conservative capitalist I have sadly become. So, with that being said, I am currently waiting on an email from the director and an administrator of the landmarks organization regarding the 2010 financial statements of the Powell house and hopefully the Landmarks Organization. This will help me draw an educated conclusion to the initial question regarding a  need for another house museum in Philadelphia, and a potential justification or bashing of house museums current business structure.  If I don't hear back from them by friday...I will answer the question based on my observations by this saturday.
thank you,

White Leon


UPDATE 10/31/11

Well, after an administrator from landmarks pointed me in the right direction as to where I could find Landmarks Financial statements, I felt that I was off to a good start and I could turn the engine on; on the wrecking ball. But to my dismay the financial statements were not what I am used to seeing. I was not familiar with "temporarily restricted, and restricted gains" without terms on their restrictions. If I do not know when the cash can be utilized, then I cannot tell the actual short run financial gain. Restricted funds can have donor imposed restrictions that don't let you touch a dollar amount for a long period of time. Luckily in 2010 the temporarily restricted and restricted dollar amounts where minimal and a negative (86k) journal entry of temporary restricted funds was mostly absorbed by a positive 85k entry so dollar amount affecting their revenues was insignificant to the bigger picture.

My biggest issue with their financial statements is the broadness of their expenses. They can hide staff payments or benefits in “Other Programs" (327k) or in their "Road Scholar" (561K) entry in their expense accounts. Now I am not saying that that is what they are doing, but "Programs" require staff and it makes sense to partially pay certain staff members through program expenses rather than Administrative expenses.

They must have done this anyway because not including their site managers, they have 8 employees and based on the broadness of their expenses in the income statement, their "Administrative and general" expenses ($222k) should include salaries and any offices expenses including rent. It is also likely that they have some sort of health benefits and/or employee savings plan.

So now tell me how you are going to employ 8 business professionals (that includes paying workmans comp,FICA tax, etc)..and run an office with all of its expenses, and potentially pay for employee benefits all for $222k a year? Doubt it! So..they must be hiding some type of staff compensation within the $327k in the other program expenses and in the $561k in the Road Scholar expenses.

With that being said, I would like to see all staff compensation of any kind separate from other expenses, as well as offices expenses and rent or loan expenses separate.

Another issue would be the changes to Net Assets and End of Year net assets area. It’s around $2 million while they had negative profits for the year. Surely they are not adding the residential or commercial appraised value of their museum properties to their Net Assets? The reason I think that, is because The Powell house alone would have to be upwards of $800K in value, and the value of all of their historical properties combined surely exceeds $2 million.

Also, I don't see any depreciation or appreciation of assets in these statements, thus their actual properties must not be included in the Net Assets section of their statements. So! The big question is what is this $2 mil in net assets?... and in what form of assets is it? Cash, bonds,property? whats the deal?  I need to know how they acquired those assets in order for me to get to the root of new growth, and also if those assets are invested, how did they only accrue 29k in interest and dividends for the 2010 fiscal year? If half of those net assets where invested cash they would have to receive a very conservative minimum of $40k in interest and dividends.

So they need to be more specific in what their net assets are when reporting their FS.

In conclusion, their financial statements are too broad for me to come to any conclusions without making drastic assumptions and if I had a 501c(3), I would report my FS exactly the same way, so no one knows what the hell is going on but me and my staff.

But I will say this, admission and membership makes up less than 2.9% of the museums revenues while the bulk of their revenues come from rental income and road scholar programs, both of which are scheduled events. $100k in profits come from the road scholar revenues while there are no direct expenses listed for the $130k in rental revenues (I am sure they are burried in "Other Programs" but I am also sure they are very minimal expenses).  I bet it’s safe to say that 50% or more of the profits from those two categories come from rental revenues meaning the rental costs would have to be under $30k while road scholar (although just as lucrative) expenses are a whopping $561k. $661k in road scholar revenues means a lot time and work from some one (or many people) on the administrative level. That time could be allocated to promoting products with minimal capital and time intensive costs and higher margins like rental revenues. Now if you focus on rental revenues (which are scheduled events), the museums no longer has to be open to the public regularly cutting down on your operating expenses. I would now take some of the net assets and use them to convert 2 of the most popular museum locations into historic, high end dining and/or historic gastro pubs depending on the needs of the market. I would slice off 1/4-1/2 of the staff now no longer needed for day to day operations, event coordination, and fundraising, and allocate the slack on to the rest of the staff for a period of time. After hiring high quality chefs, restaurant managers, and new young hip, hot and hungry event coordinators, I would promote the hell out of the two locations to the point of market saturation. If you know about these two restaurant/pubs and you haven’t been there.. Then you’re a fucking loser.

After the cash from these 2 nonprofit historic businesses start rolling in (and with $2mil startup cash you can guarantee that with the right people they will be financially successful).  I would start investing the profits in my non restaurant/pub museum and reopen it to the public with better programs and interactive public features better than ever before.  Once I publicize the shit out of that, I would use any funds I have to start acquiring other failing house museums in the Philadelphia region. At that point, with the political approval I would now have because of the new philly jobs I have created as well as the fine new example  I have created in running my newly reopened, program oriented, soon to be self-sustaining house museum, I should have little problem in getting failing house museums to turn over their keys to me at pennies on the dollar which I will then fix up and eventually make self-sustaining with new interactive programs for the public. How will I make these house museums self-sustaining you might ask? Its pretty simple. Limit them to scheduled tours, programs, rentals, and weekend hours to keep their operations costs minimal while at the same time consolidating all of the administrative duties of all of the museums to one office kind of like Landmarks does but on a larger more efficient scale with more museums and less focus on capital/time intensive products like road scholar and more time on volunteer run products like weekend hours as well as focusing on low capital/time intensive high margin products like rentals.

The more museums I have, the lower the operating costs become per museum if I consolidate the administration.

The goal would be to eventually build a firm of 10-12 house museums where 2-3 of them were historic restaurants and/or gastro pubs. All the profits from the rest./pubs from an accounting standpoint would be “eaten up” in administrative and startup costs for reopening these new interesting and interactive house museums. All the while paying the director (me, the capitalist pig) a hefty but perfectly feasible salary with benefits which would then count as part of operating expenses of a 501 non-profit organization of which all profits(assets) would be tax free. Reason being is that I would still show the upstairs of these restaurants/gastro pubs as museums with exhibits that are free of admission which people would technically be visiting every time they go to the pub or restaurant downstairs.  Like I said, with that setup, everything would be tax free. Museums are doing it now just not to their fullest extent. There is a restaurant in most museums today and I am sure that’s where most of the “business profits” (not handouts) come from. And even if I am missing a small rule here or there in codes or committees etc. etc. I’ve been there before, and with the right ideas and the right salesman codes are made to be modified people do it everyday….So let’s take this shit to the next level baby! Yeaaa! haha



Update: 11/1/11
I never answered the question "Does Philadelphia need another house museum?"...the answer is NO

Penn Museum Review

Our visit to the Penn Museum was pretty boring, but much better than I would have expected for a university museum.  The museum was filled with 3 floors of interesting artifacts from 4,000 years ago up today. Artifacts from all across the world from Greek and Roman to Native American and African artifacts. Sounds great right? I was bored out of my skull!

I liked Independence hall and the Pearle paintings because it was theme focused materials that were directly related to economic history. Lessons of the past that we could use to pave our futures. Whats more important than our present and future?

I also liked the Wagner because it was all biology artifacts that a lot is still present in our world today. The museum was also focused on it's theme and short and sweet. The museum also gave a lesson about the past by the way that it's organization was preserved in time.

According to the text the original organizers of the Penn Museum wanted it to be a museum of art and natural sciences but somewhere along the way it became focused on archeology.

I didn;t like how the Penn Museum blurred its focus on Archeology much more than the other 2 museums with exhibits that didn't really relate well to the focus of the museum like the "fang!" exhibit about demythologizing vampires. Or the "Righteous Dope Fiend" exhibit about living on the street. I understand that both of these exhibit can be construed as contemporary archeology but I just think that they blurred the focus and theme of the museum.


One very important thing that I did learn at this museum was the purpose of this class.

I live my life to follow the money. If you follow the money, you can make money. Everything in politics as a special interest, a facade of doing something but really doing it for another reason altogether; and the reason always dwindles down to dollars and cents.

Prof. Bruggeman during the post museum discussion that museums all have facades and special interests in a way. They promote a theme or focus to the public for one reason but there is usually an underlying special interest, and that special interest is usually money.

Prof. Bruggeman also said that his goal by the end of this class is teach us how to follow the money in museums just by walking through them and observing your surrounds. I believe that special interest part of a museum is more interesting than any of it's contents. So with that being said I am excited to learn more, and I will keep an ear out about learning this skill from Prof. Bruggeman as time goes on.

Independence Hall and the Second National Bank Rant and Review

This museum trip was a much more interesting trip than I expected it to be. I find that happening more and more in this class. I absolutely dread going to these museums and hearing these people talk about them, but when I start to view the artifacts within the museums I am always pleasantly surprised to see the significance in the exhibits and why these people (my Teacher, the Curator, my fellow classmates) are so passionate about them. It almost (and I do say ALMOST) justifies the museums $24 million a year budget. (Just stating that alone is a huge step for me)

At the end of our tour, what brought me to this decision of almost justifying the need in society for this museum, was the curator's heartfelt speech. One of the main points of her speech was that this "museum" (a collection of Pearle's painting of important people) was setup to make people think. To use their brains in life and potentially influence their decisions in what they want to be, what they want to be known for, and who they are now. That is powerful and important stuff. I personally feel that the majority of people are just kind of floating around in this world paying attention to what they like and not paying attention to what the need to do nor planning properly for the future.

Theoretically, if the Pearle museum can influence 5% of its 5.2 million annual visitors to THINK about these aspects of life, then it truly justifies their budget and the need for these types of museums in society. On a side note, I think a much better approach would be to consolidate the artifacts of all the museums in one region into 3 or 4 central locations. This would be more affective in every way for museums and society.  First off you could close and sell dozens of locations/property and get rid of tens of millions of dollars in annual overhead for the city, state, and country. Then, you could have these central museums with different gallery segments devoted to specific old museums trade large parts of their collections with other cities central museums for 3 to 6 month periods kind of like they already do today with specific exhibitions but with large amounts of stuff. An example would be rather than doing an exhibition on Rembrandt, central museums would do exhibitions on the old Wagner museum, the old Pearle museum, and the old Powell house combined.

The logistics of constantly moving all of these artifacts around would make up for a lot of the job loss from the initial shutdown of the smaller museums. Now that we would be  saving a bunch of tax payer dollars while offering the same artifacts at more accessible locations here comes the most important part, the marketing.

One of the biggest problems I have seen so far in this class is that we (the students) are seeing all of these amazing and significant artifacts and before this point, almost everyone in the class did not seem to know that these artifacts existed let alone some of the museums themselves existed. By consolidating these 12-20 museums into 3 or 4 central locations, the visitors will be able to see so much more and get a bang for their buck while doing so. Someone in the museum community's rebuttal to this idea might be, ' If you are putting them all in one place, people are not making as many trips to see the artwork, not paying for as many taxi's and dinners, and tickets for each individual museum and spending less money overall. Wouldn't you losing GDP dollars in the long run?' and the short answer is no. People will continue to go to these museums time and time again because using this new method of large scale 3-6 month exhibitions people will be going to see and noice that 40% of the museum's stuff will be new, so it will like visiting a new museum every time you go.

Rather than the current method of attracting people with one artist or one type of theme for an exhibit that already has to interest that specific individual. This way everytime you go it's like you are going to a new, quality museum, and you always know it is going to be different and entertaining. Everyone from everywhere gets to see everything whereas no one is going to come out of state to see some of the smaller (but still interesting) museums of Philadelphia because the museums don't have the marketing budget to reach those people nor the right amount of stuff to entertain them for a day trip. And don't forget under this format  taxpayer overhead for museums can be significantly lower.       

Now there could be many rebuttals to this idea of central city museums and how they don't create as many GDP dollars as the current setup, and I could defend that all day but I am sure I am already over 500 words.

How I am going to relate this to the readings:

I can somewhat see why Prof. Bruggeman assigned these readings. Tea time at Valley Forge was of the same era as the people painted in the Pearle paintings. Sitting in front of me, I have the article and a 1 1/2 pages of notes on it, but in reality the article was too in-depth for me.  I have a hard time making a solid connection between the article and the visit. Sure the article was about different museums like the Essex Institute and methods of displaying artifacts like the period room (invented by Francis Dole). But after 16 pages of disorganized facts I had a hard time relating it to anything. I know my Prof. disagrees and we discussed in class, but I did not learn the theme or the purpose of this article.

The second article "Public History and the study of memory", relates so much more to this museum visit. The purpose of this article was to show how we are supposed to view public history and how we collect and display these perceptions of past events. That correlates so well to this past museum visit because this museum was a museum of important or influential people of the past that were supposed to be remembered for their past. They were carefully selected by an individual to do so (not many individuals). It was great to see the accidental point of view of Pearle's time period. All of these individuals were WHITE and I mean white Christian males! They were all that mattered, they were all that was significant to display as a memory of the past. The museum was an interesting opposite to what the article shows how museums display public memory today. Screw Flanders

Philadelphia Museum of Art review

My trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art was more interesting and vast with information than I originally expected it to be.  I arrived there early around ten am. The rain and fog painted a gloomy picture of a massive building or should I say, monument. Not having my morning coffee, and having my now typical feeling of exhaustion, I coward at the thought of climbing the buildings front steps, so I went up the side near the parking area. The view of the city from the top of the stairs was breathtaking. It made you feel like you were on top of the city, and important in a sense. Once I got inside the interior was just as vast and pronounced as the exterior, it was large in what I am guessing to be Roman or Greek style, with massive pillars and columns and staircases everywhere I looked. The large wall hanging rugs made me feel like I was in a temple. You can tell that when the main building was built back in 1933, it was built to be the monument that withstands the tests of time.

Once I looked at the map, I jetted up to the second floor to where I thought my favorite exhibit would be; the Arms and Armor Gallery. I am not the artsy type in the least and have little appreciation for art but ancient swords, guns, and armor were right up my ally.

This room in the gallery really changed my expectation of memory. It made me realize that time periods where there were minimal technology had the means to build things to last unlike today. The attention to detail that went into every gun, sword, and plate of armor showed you the quality in materials they used, a quality that you would not find in a product of today’s standards.

You can tell that the way some of the works were displayed was in origin order. There was one glass case where there where several of the same style of black powder rifles and you can see each one was an improvement on the one before it either in style or performance design. I liked that the museum's setup was intuitive in that sense.

Another area that showed me similar ideals in exceeding my expectations of memory was the costume and textiles gallery. The reason this gallery was interesting to me is because it displayed pieces of clothing from hundreds of years ago up to the 21^st century so it was easy to make a comparison of products made today and similar products made in the past. In every case I saw something made 150 years ago was always better than something made after 1950 (the decade of the creation of disposable products). The attention to detail in the past and quality of materials far exceeds the products of today. I even saw a 200 year old servants coat that was more beautiful and made of better material that any item of clothing I have ever owned being a middle class white American. It was very interesting that the museums display of quality goods really changed my idea (the public’s idea) of what the technologies of the past truly are. The technologies of the distant past 

 are not as elementary as we thought them to be.

While I was on the first floor I also took a look at their new exhibit gallery which was currently displaying several painting of Rembrandt van Rijn. I knew that he was a famous painter from the 1600’s but I did not know much about his work. This exhibition made me realize how important he was. I could be wrong, but I believe in some of the literature I read it said that this was the first Rembrandt exhibition in Philadelphia since 1932 and that this exhibit reunited this series of paintings for the first time since 1656. I feel that I may have interpreted something wrong about this statement because it seems monumental (how fitting). If it is truly the case that this exhibition is the first time this series of paintings has been reunited since the 1600’s then that is nuts and I am honored to be able to say that I saw it. I feel like so many interesting and important historical exhibits go unnoticed in the city of Philadelphia, so it was amazing to see something like this.

As far as the rest of the museum goes, the format of the paintings and displays were much more informative than the Wager. Almost everything in there had a plaque with a name and a date. I was able to understand what I was seeing and the importance of it, and I think that was the main goal for the museum. To help visitors to understand the artwork and the importance or significance of it, whereas the Wagner was there to display power and significance beyond the public's understanding.

The Philadelphia museum of Art exceeded my expectations and understanding of memory. It was a great trip and I wouldn’t mind paying attention more often to when there is new exhibition in town.