A new, multimillion-dollar national sports museum springs up in the heart of a downtown, promising to overhaul a neighborhood while bringing in tens of thousands of tourists. With easy access to a market of millions, organizers grab headlines with splashy concept drawings and bring in top-flight athletes like former pro footballer Tiki Barber.
That sounds a lot like Easton's vision for its proposed National High School Sports Hall of Fame Museum, but it's also a description of the nearly $100 million Sports Museum of America. That attraction opened in Manhattan to huge fanfare in 2008, but closed this year and then filed for bankruptcy in March after failing to meet attendance projections despite being in one of the nation's biggest sports markets.
If the planned $10 million Easton museum is to avoid a similar fate, experts say, it will have to work closely with nearby attractions, market itself well and, above all, stick to realistic estimates about how many people will go to a sports museum.
"Done rightly, it can be a success. [But] you've got to be very careful with what you're projecting," said Lee Roy Smith, executive director of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Okla.
"All you have to do is look at how difficult it is for a hall of fame or sports museum to do well.…Exaggerating visitorship is probably one of the most often heard-of problems with museums that shut down," said Smith, who's also a member of the International Sports Heritage Association, a network of about 130 halls of fame and museums.
The Easton attraction is to be part of a new, city-owned complex along S. Third Street that's also to include a parking garage and bus depot used by the Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority. Mayor Sal Panto Jr. has said he expects the city and LANTA to spend about $12 million, including $7.5 million in federal and state grants.
A city authority would own the museum's building and lease it to the National High School Coaches Association, which is working on raising the $10 million it says it needs to outfit the building as a museum. The attraction is projected to open as early as late 2011.
"We're going to market it throughout the entire Northeast," said Bob Ferraro Sr., the coaches association president and an Easton native. He and other officials have said they hope to draw visitors not only from Philadelphia and New York, but from as far away as Boston and Washington, D.C.
"Anywhere from 75,000 to 100,000 people, I think, is a very conservative [attendance] estimate in the first year," Ferraro said, adding he hopes to attract "busloads of students" from the more than 4,000 high schools within driving distance.
That's an ambitious attendance goal, according to Karen Bednarski, executive director of the International Sports Heritage Association. "Attendance over 100,000 tends to be reserved for the biggest and the best-known halls of fame," she said, citing examples like the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine, Fla.
The Cooperstown hall typically draws more than 300,000 visitors per year. This year, however, officials expect it to miss that mark for the first time in 12 years because of bad weather and the economy, The New York Times has reported.
Whether the Easton hall of fame meets its target will depend on how well it markets itself, how accessible it is, and whether it includes student tour groups in its attendance figures, Bednarski said.
"If they're counting all those things, then yes, I think [100,000] is very achievable," she said.
At a public hearing last week, Panto said the facility will have athletic testing and training facilities and high-tech, interactive exhibits such as talking holograms. He also noted the museum's partnerships with companies that have national marketing reach and suggested that new museum partner IMG, an international sports management company, might bring in an athlete like Tiger Woods to give a putting demonstration.
On Wednesday the Easton Redevelopment Authority moved to condemn the former Perkins restaurant and Marquis Theatre along S. Third Street, where officials intend to build the complex. The site is about one block south of Easton's biggest tourist attraction: Two Rivers Landing, home to the Crayola Factory and the National Canal Museum, which are on track to see more than 300,000 visitors this year.
"When families come into the area, they're looking for additional things to do" after they finish at Crayola, said the attraction's executive director, Ramona Hollie-Major. "If somebody drove in from New York and took that two-or three-hour drive, it's nice to have other options for them in the downtown area."
Though no deals have been worked out, Ferraro said he hopes to offer joint admission tickets that will let visitors into his museum as well as Crayola, the canal museum and the nearby local history museum under construction by the Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society.
Michael Stershic, president of the Lehigh Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau, agrees there's potential for overlap.
"Generally, you're going to have some older kids and some younger kids who are going to travel along with you," Stershic said. While Crayola might attract elementary school-age children and younger, Stershic predicts the high school sports museum will be a hit with seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders who are just starting to get excited about high school sports.
And although many schools have cut back on field trips, Stershic suspects the museum also will attract lots of visits from sports teams, funded not by school boards but by school booster clubs.
However, the Easton hall of fame would face the challenge of not having obvious connections to any established sports attractions, other than Lafayette College's teams halfway across town.
Ron Davini, executive director of the National High School Baseball Coaches Association, noted that many halls of fame have ties with college sports teams, stadiums or sports equipment companies' visitors centers. Davini said his association is still working on setting up such a partnership, which is a main reason it doesn't yet have a brick-and-mortar hall of fame.
The College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind., ties its promotions closely to Fighting Irish home games at the nearby University of Notre Dame, said Executive Director Lisa Klunder. The hall of fame attracts about 60,000 to 68,000 visitors yearly.
Smith's wrestling hall of fame, in the same town as Oklahoma State University, brings in about 10,000 visitors per year.
The Sports Museum of America, on the other hand, had been counting on as many as 1 million visitors per year, according to published accounts. Actual attendance was about 60 percent below those projections.
Similarly, the Sports Museum of Los Angeles closed in March because of low attendance. It had been open only four months.
Panto said the coaches association is still putting together the museum's financial numbers, which will show how many visitors it would need to keep afloat. In addition, several local tourism companies are funding an independent study of the city's potential as a tourist destination.
"It's hard to predict -- halls of fame vary in their attendance patterns," Stershic said. "A lot depends on how they do it: How interactive it is, what word of mouth gets out about it. It's going to be wait-and-see."
michael.duck@mcall.com
610-778-7985
SPORTS ON DISPLAY
Facts about Easton's planned National
High School Sports Hall of Fame Museum:
How big: 20,000 square feet; two floors of a new three-story
building.
What it would feature: Interactive, high-tech exhibits; a training and
facility intended to attract Olympic-class athletes; a theater, restaurant and gift shop on the first floor.
Who would run it: The National
High School Coaches Association, which oversees national championships in 11
sports and selects national athletes and coaches of the year in 20
sports.
When it would
open: Late 2011 or early 2012.
How many people would come: As many as 100,000 visitors in the first year.
Sources: National
High School Coaches Association and Mayor Sal Panto Jr.
