In search of a different way to celebrate 35 years in business, Frankel & Co., the people who helped launch McDonald’s Happy Meals and Marshall Field’s Jingle Elves, this year decided to forgo its traditional summer party in one of the city’s gilded hotel ballrooms.
Instead, the Chicago-based marketing and promotion company did what many corporations now do when they want to fete employes or impress customers. They went to a museum.
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“We thought this was a pivotal year in the company, a time to look back at our 35 years of history,” said Richard Williams, a spokesman for Frankel who put together the Aug. 13 party for 550 employees and clients, “so what more appropriate place for the party than the Chicago Historical Society?
“It worked out perfectly. We did a big outdoor cookout in tents behind the building. . . . The museum galleries remained open just for us, something our people really enjoyed.
“The party was supposed to end at 9 p.m.,” he added, “but there were 150 or 200 people still partying when we nudged them out at 10:30.”
With Labor Day weekend here, the Frankel party was but a harbinger of the city’s big social season. As the professional world gets back on regular schedules, corporations start holding big company events; the convention and trade shows come to town in force; and foundations and non-profit agencies begin holding their fundraising affairs.
Increasingly, museums are part of it all. Forced to look for innovative ways of bringing in new revenue in an era of declining government support, museums and zoos have gone into the party business.
These are places that 20 years ago were mostly darkened, empty echo chambers at night, locked up and buttoned down, with armed guards inside to keep the public out. Now, their dramatic, unusual interiors are being rented out for some of Chicago’s most chic gatherings. And the demand continues to grow, say business and museum officials.
Soon partyers in tuxedos and gowns will spend evenings gliding amongst stuffed elephants and gargantuan dinosaur bones in the massive, marbled central atrium of the Field Museum of Natural History, to the tunes of a ballroom orchestra.
Over at the Shedd Aquarium, tables dressed in white linen and silver service will transform the darkened, arched fish galleries into one of the most striking dinner venues in town. Out at Brookfield Zoo, folks will have evening cocktails under the watchful eyes of the alligators in the steamy environs of the swamp exhibit.
Similar institutions throughout the country have been doing the same thing. But given the number and central location of large cultural institutions in Chicago, the busiest convention center in the nation, officials here think the city’s museums and zoos may be playing party hosts more than anywhere else.
Art Institute officials, for example, say they rent spaces out for parties more than any other museum in the country, with 375 to 400 evening parties a year. Shedd Aquarium is open more than 200 nights a year for such events. The Historical Society, Museum of Science and Industry, Brookfield Zoo and Field Museum are opened for parties about 150 nights.
Most of the rest of the city’s institutions also are in the hunt for more party business, hiring events managers to drum it up. New additions and restaurants going into Adler Planetarium and Lincoln Park Zoo were planned in part to expand their nighttime rentals.
The booming ’90s economy seems to ensure that there is plenty of party business to go around, both for traditional venues, such as hotel ballrooms and banquet halls, and for non-traditional sites like museums.
“There is more money being spent than there was 8 or 10 years ago,” said Joyce Westin Dunne, a Chicago party and wedding planner. “There is more entertaining among corporate people. Weddings are getting bigger and more elaborate than they were eight years ago. Ballrooms are often booked solid a year in advance.”
The regal atmosphere of the ornate architecture of big, public institutions, along with the uniqueness of having a museum or zoo open only for you and your guests, is the big selling point of holding parties in such places, whether they are giant corporate affairs or private events.
“I wanted something different,” said Cindi Webber of her quest to find an unusual place to celebrate her Sept. 3, 1994, marriage to attorney Mike Webber. “Hotel ballrooms, I couldn’t tell one from the other.”
For her, the search stopped when she stepped into the Chicago Historical Society, which had just the sort of elegant but unusual ambience Webber was looking for.
“It was the spiral staircase and the chandelier that sold me on the (Historical Society),” she said.
Brides seem to find the idea of making a grand entrance on the museum’s north atrium staircase irresistible. Overhead hangs a magnificent chandelier that once graced a Rockefeller mansion, a perfect prop for wedding pictures.
Another grand staircase, at the south end of the Field Museum’s Stanley Field Hall, was used to great effect by Princess Diana at a party held in her honor last year and has also made that museum a popular wedding venue.
The inside of Kovler Lion House at Lincoln Park Zoo is a magnificent example of ornate Victorian design and is surprisingly chic when filled with white linen tables for formal dinner. The vigilant big cats usually watch the human activity with fascination from their side of the bars, sometimes joining the festivities in their own way.
“The cats are nocturnal, so at night, during these parties, they are more active than they are during the day,” said Ann Carson, the zoo’s special events coordinator.
“They (the cats) are terribly curious at the parties. If you get up during the dinner to make a speech or a toast, you are almost guaranteed to get a roar out of the male lion.”
In an era of increasingly aggressive competition for convention and trade show business with entertainment hubs like Las Vegas and Orlando, the drawing power of, for example, the Museum of Science and Industry’s coal mine and U-505 submarine, seems to stand up well to Wayne Newton and Mickey Mouse.
A corporation in town for a giant trade show can rent the entire museum to entertain 5,000 prospective customers for a night. Cost: $7,600 until 11 p.m., $1,000 for every hour thereafter. Food, beverages are extra.
Lincoln Park Zoo in its entirety –Farm in the Zoo and the new Regenstein small mammal-reptile house included–can be rented for $15,000. Brookfield Zoo, which can accommodate up to 15,000, can be had for $10,000.
Food and beverages, depending on whether it’s just snacks or a formal sit-down dinner, go from a few dollars per person to nearly $100 for each guest.
Ex-Parisian Ted Spiegel, the Art Institute’s executive director of special events, is a pioneer in renting spaces in American museums.
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“If you have the money,” said Spiegel, “I know very well how to spend it.”
For $450 a person, he can produce a themed, haute cuisine dinner for hundreds, re-creating a world or a sensibility suggested by great artists and artworks in the museum. Spiegel’s Monet dinners use recipes from impressionist painter Claude Monet’s own kitchen, and tables are laid out in settings resembling a Monet painting.
One Chicago-based corporation, flying in scores of its most valued international clients from around the world for an evening party, commissioned Spiegel to re-create an eight-course dinner held in honor of the czar of Russia in 1800 in Paris’ legendary Tour d’Argent restaurant. He assigned four liveried servants to attend to each table of six diners.
Most night events are not Spiegel’s customized parties but less costly corporate affairs for 50 to 4,000, linked to the museum’s special exhibits, such as the Monet and Degas retrospectives in recent years.
This year’s major exhibit is a retrospective on French impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir, Oct. 21 through Jan. 4. The museum has parties booked every night of the exhibit, seven nights a week, sometimes two and three parties each night.
Seeing the success of evening rentals at the Art Institute, other large cultural institutions in the early 1980s began doing the same. They found a gold mine to tap into with the city’s conventioneers.
In 1996, 4.3 million people came to the city for conventions, trade shows and corporate meetings, spending $4.7 billion, a lot of that on entertainment.
“When you are a corporation at a convention trying to romance customers, any party you hold is faced with heavy competition from other parties by other companies romancing the same people,” said Carol Konieczny, special events director at the Field Museum of Natural History.
“You want to do something that sounds interesting, not just another bash in another ballroom.”
Having a city so rich with cultural institutions has helped local hotels attract business meetings and conventions to Chicago.
“We get referral business from hotels,” said Denis Frankenfield, the Shedd Aquarium’s catering director. “Having all these great museums and zoos and the aquarium is a marketing tool for hotels trying to drum up convention business.”
Renting themselves out at night does far more for the museums than just bring in new revenue, said Ally Allman, corporate events director at the historical society.
“Reopening at night for private events is just a sensible way of using facilities that otherwise are standing empty,” she said. “Besides, it’s a great way to bring in people who might not normally visit your institution, so you are getting more exposure to more people.
“That falls right in line with the mission of the institution.”