The city’s oldest museum, the Chicago Historical Society, plans to celebrate its 150th birthday next year by spending $22 million to gut and dramatically reconfigure almost all of its exhibit halls.
When the project is completed in fall 2006, the museum will have torn out 75 percent of its public areas, added exhibit areas and totally rethought its use of 22 million artifacts of city, regional and national history.
“It all will be a model of what an urban historical museum should be in this country in the 21st Century, and what an educational force a museum like this should be for the rest of the city,” said Historical Society President Lonnie Bunch, who was hired away from a top post at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2000 expressly to reinvigorate the Chicago museum.
Mayor Richard Daley is scheduled to be at the Historical Society Friday morning to join Bunch in announcing the project, which includes the first significant renovation of its Chicago history galleries since 1978.
Construction work, which will not affect the exterior footprint of the building but will dramatically alter the interior, already has begun. Most galleries housing permanent collections are already closed, and curators are moving artifacts to storage to make way for construction crews.
The museum will continue its scheduled special exhibitions through Dec. 4, and an active schedule of public programs and tours will continue without interruption throughout the renovation, officials said.
A grand opening gala is planned for autumn 2006 as the beginning of a yearlong anniversary celebration.
Visitors arriving through the main Clark Street entrance will see a dramatic change. The two-story atrium with an immense staircase that was built in a 1986 addition will be gone, as will the second-floor public event room at the top of the staircase, a popular place for evening parties and weddings.
Those spaces will find new homes in the rear of the building, where they will have dramatic views of Lincoln Park and Lake Michigan.
`City’s collective memory’
“In effect, we’re moving those public areas to the back of the house and are moving the museum to the front,” said Bunch. “Instead of stairs and velvet ropes, visitors as they come into the front door are going to be greeted by and immersed in Chicago and American history artifacts great and small, like Abraham Lincoln’s White House carriage, Gabby Hartnett’s baseball catcher’s gear and beautiful, dramatic old 19th Century daguerreotype photos.
“I want people to really get the feeling right away as they enter here that they are entering into the city’s collective memory.”
The first floor also will house a new exhibit area created expressly for children, he said, and another dedicated to the museum’s renowned costume and textile collection.
The 1st `L’ car
As visitors reach the second floor, they will find the re-creation of an 1893 elevated train station, which will feature the first elevated train car used in the city.
Car No. 1, still its designation, is a gift from the Chicago Transit Authority to the museum and will move into the building after the second floor is reinforced to bear its weight, Bunch said.
Visitors will be allowed to board the old car, which was first put into use to take visitors from downtown to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Hyde Park. It remained in service until the 1930s.
The “L” car and station, Bunch said, will serve as the starting point to the completely revamped galleries on Chicago. Filling 16,000 square feet, they will more than double the space the museum formerly devoted to city history.
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“The overarching theme is that Chicago is a crossroads, both in the sense of a physical place, but also as a crossroads of ideas, people and money,” he said. “We argue that at an active crossroads, sometimes great innovations occur, but sometimes great tragedy and disappointments occur too.”
To tell those stories, he said, the museum is abandoning the usual linear layout of historical artifacts, beginning from the city’s earliest years and progressing to the present. Instead it will examine several major themes.
It will begin with a gallery called “City on the Make,” showing how Chicago’s economic life has always been connected globally, from its first fur traders to its emergence as a farm tool manufacturing center, steel and railway hub and home of the Chicago Board of Trade.
That exhibit gives way to “City in Crisis,” which will look at how the city responded to moments from the 1871 Chicago Fire and the 1919 race riots to urban and political unrest in 1968.
“Sweet Home Chicago” is a gallery devoted to the city’s neighborhoods and suburbs.
“It has objects telling the story of each community,” said Bunch, “and it has interactive scrapbooks so that visitors can touch a map of the area or community they are interested in, and there will be images of what it looked like five years ago, 20 years ago or 100 years ago, whether it’s Austin on the West Side or Oak Park or Naperville in the west suburbs.”
“Sweet Home Chicago” also will examine the roles race, religion and politics played in the formation of neighborhoods and suburbs.
Something for children
Each of the new exhibits, Bunch said, will be designed with human stories in mind to give life to the artifacts, many of which have never been on display before. The exhibits also will use interactive displays to engage visitors, especially schoolchildren.
“I’m less interested in children factually knowing dates, like the day of the Chicago Fire, and more interested in showing kids how history has shaped them,” he said. “I want them to leave here and go out and see the whole city as a great artifact, and get them thinking about how their neighborhoods came to be what they are today.”
An exhibit called “Second to None” will examine great innovations that came out of the city, from the revolutionary businesses that established Marshall Field’s, Crate & Barrel, and Sears, Roebuck & Co. as archetypal retail concepts, to groundbreaking social welfare concepts like Jane Addams’ Hull House and juvenile justice. It also will include early breakthroughs in movie and television production, like Charlie Chaplin’s first films, as well as great architectural works.
A final Chicago exhibit, “My Kind of Town,” will celebrate the city’s cultural life, featuring both World’s Fairs, the city park system, sports and music, including the re-creation of a 1930s blues club inviting visitors to come in and sit down at cabaret tables to see and hear the city’s rich history in the development of jazz.
By decking over some atrium spaces, the new construction will create 4,000 square feet of exhibit space. That will allow the museum to replace its American history gallery with a new one and expand the spaces reserved for temporary exhibits, said Bunch.
The $22 million renovation budget is being funded by a capital campaign, Bunch said. The co-chairmen are board Chairman John Rowe and trustee Paul Snyder, Bunch said, and $19.3 million already has been raised. “It’s going to be a horse race to get it all finished in time,” said Bunch.