Like somebody watching as the door to an overstuffed closet bulges from the pressure of too many coats, boots and umbrellas, Field Museum officials last week finally gave in to a moan of exasperation.
With more than 21 million artifacts in a natural history collection that grows by the hundreds of thousands every year, the museum says it has run out of space and is asking the state for $60 million to expand its storage facilities.
The situation is so dire, officials say, that portions of the 80-year-old building, covering 5 1/2 acres with more than 1 million square feet of interior space, are literally sinking under the tremendous weight of the museum’s holdings.
As the collections grow, they crowd out work space for the scientists and students who study the objects. Worse, they eat into public spaces. Two huge former exhibit halls on the ground floor have been walled off so they can house oversize objects from birch-bark canoes to Roman bathtubs to dinosaur bones.
Unlike a housekeeper, the museum can’t relieve the storage problem simply by pitching out the least-valued items or giving them to Goodwill Industries.
“Our charter says that we must preserve our collections in perpetuity for the people of Illinois,” said Barry Chernoff, the museum’s curator of fishes.
Pulling a small jar off a shelf, Chernoff deftly slid out a 2 1/2-inch adult catfish collected by a Field expedition along a stretch of the Amazon River in 1912.
“To have specimens like these preserved from all over the world is priceless,” Chernoff said. “We can compare this fish to specimens pulled out of the same stretch of the Amazon today, for example, and see if environmental changes and pollutants are causing physiological changes.”
Chernoff’s department has 3 million fish stored in 120,000 jars and several hundred steel tanks filled with alcohol preservative. The jars are kept on 6.2 miles of shelving in the northeast corner of the museum’s ground floor, where their collective weight is so tremendous that the concrete floor slabs have sunk several inches and tilted.
“Before I arrived in 1987, every time a pencil fell off my predecessor’s desk, it rolled all the way into the hallway,” Chernoff said. “He used a bungee cord to hook his chair up to his desk so it wouldn’t roll away, letting him use both his hands for typing. I made them level the floor in my office when I came.”
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Of the $60 million requested, $10 million would go to building a new handicapped-accessible entrance for school tour groups on the building’s east side. The entrance they now use, on the west side, will be cut off from vehicular traffic once renovations to Soldier Field are complete.
The rest of the money would be used to build state-of-the-art space for the museum’s collections.
“We don’t call it storage because we don’t collect these things and just store them away,” Chernoff said. “We think of it as `collections facilities’ because we and visiting scholars go into these jars constantly to study the specimens.”
On the southeast side of the ground floor, sinking floors aren’t the problem. Lack of proper environmental controls is.
“I am deeply shamed to be showing this to a reporter,” said anthropologist Jonathan Haas, walking among hundreds of thousands of anthropological artifacts–ceramics, basketry, spears–brought back from long-ago expeditions.
He pointed to areas on the walls where moisture was seeping in from the ground outside, and to water dripping from 50-year-old pipes running along the ceiling. Underneath the pipes, artifacts have been wrapped in custom-made plastic bags to keep them from getting wet.
“This is not a showcase of how things should be stored and maintained,” Haas said. “By current industry standards, this is deplorable.”
Up on the mezzanine level, Haas opened the door to a new storeroom converted last year from a public exhibition area, one that most recently held popular temporary exhibits on the Chicago Bears and motorcycles.
Now the space is given over to huge tiers of shelving and more than half a million artifacts from ancient Native American cultures from the Southwest. It is one of the most valuable such holdings in the world and one of the most constantly studied collections in the museum, Haas said.
“Look at how deep this shelving is. It allows us to take proper care of the objects, but it’s so hard to get at things that we’ve lost access to the collection to an important degree,” he said. “It takes hours to pull things out to get to what you want, then hours to place things back.”
The botany department’s 2.7 million plant specimens bulge out of storage cabinets, many antiquated and rickety from constant use.
The cabinets fill every available square foot of the department’s sprawling quarters on the museum’s third floor, including the hallways.
Virtually unimproved since the museum was completed in 1921, the few work spaces for visitors to study specimens are usually ill-lit and have no electrical outlets–certainly no hookups for computers.
The geology department is in even more dire straits.
“We have no growth space left at all for lower vertebrates, our fossil fishes, amphibians and reptiles,” said Olivier Rieppel, chairman of the department. “We’re soon bringing in a new curator whose mission is to go out and find more dinosaurs–big dinosaurs–for us, and when he does, our need for space will be desperate.”
Bags unceremoniously piled in the corner of a third-floor storeroom and marked as “compacted trash” actually contain rock that surrounded the fossilized bones of the museum’s celebrated Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, Sue.
“All that still has to be sorted through and examined microscopically,” said collections manager Bill Simpson. “We know it is filled with microfossils of pollen and things like frog, lizard and mammal teeth that will explain a lot about Sue’s world.”
At the other end of the room, piled on desk space supposed to be used by visiting scholars, is an assortment of dinosaur ribs brought back from Madagascar.
Planning additional space for the museum is complicated by the fact that the huge structure is a historic landmark, meaning its exterior design by law cannot be altered.
Luckily, Daniel Burnham, the building’s legendary architect, gave the museum a flourish of grandeur by adding massive terraces to its exterior.
Nothing is under the terraces and their vast flights of steps except dirt, so the museum is proposing to extend the terrace on its southern side and put a two-story, 167,000-square-foot storage facility under it.
With state-of-the-art heat and humidity controls, unsinkable floors and space-efficient storage cabinets, the facility would bring the museum up to contemporary standards, officials said.
Moving many of the collections now on the third floor to the terrace area would free up space scientists want for offices and labs. The public would notice the change most after huge galleries on the ground and main floors, 75,000 square feet in all, are restored as exhibit spaces.
John McCarter, museum president, said he has the backing of Gov. George Ryan, Mayor Richard Daley and key legislative leaders for the $60 million. He hopes work can begin this year.
“It will take two years to complete our work and two years to complete the Soldier Field renovation,” he said. “We really would like to have it all done at the same time so that we don’t have to drag out that mess and inconvenience for years to come.”
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