Location Trumps Good Ideas
Location, location, location.
You’ve all heard that real estate chant. Whether or not your home has a granite counter top, what’s really important is the location.
For instance, house sales in Lebanon, Conn., are very slow right now because of its proximity to Syria and the potential political instability.
Residential real estate is not the only “location” challenge, of course. The Long Wharf Theater in New Haven is going to regret its relocation from the unglamorous Long Wharf parking lot/warehouse/highway site to beautiful, downtown New Haven.
While the quality of the actors and the scripts have played an important role in Long Wharf’s success, it’s easy access off I-91 for suburban audiences with no interest in navigating the mean streets of New Haven has played an equally important role.
Location, location, location.
The Goodspeed Opera House theater flirted with, but did not proceed, with a decision to move from its small-town, come-over-the-tiny bridge, take-a-ride-in-the-country location in East Haddam, to a more gritty, urban, if a bit more accessible, Middletown site.
Museum locations are particularly idiosyncratic, in large part because their sites are determined by murky history, or proximity to a very wealthy donor who lives nearby.
For instance, the proposed Cohen Garbage Bag Twist Tie Museum will be located in Hartford, because it will be funded in large part from the proceeds of Cohen’s earnings from column writing for the Hartford Business Journal.
Some of these siting decisions make perfect sense. The Coast Guard is proposing a National Coast Guard Museum for New London, home to the Coast Guard Academy. The southeastern corner of the state, home to casinos and Mystic Seaport and other tourist stuff, is probably a good place to plop a new museum — especially if it has an understandable tie to the area.
The only possible concern is that the Coast Guard trains and utilizes the best drug-sniffing dogs in the world, which might scare away unusually happy museum visitors.
On the other hand, history alone doesn’t necessarily do the trick. Based on little more than being located in consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s hometown, there was little logic to the plan for a Tort Museum of sorts in Winsted, Conn., to honor the many brave trial attorneys who have given of themselves to settle slip-and-fall cases without having to go to trial. The museum idea died a quiet death — as opposed to the noisy and somewhat expensive death of a proposed Purple Heart museum in Enfield.
No adjutant general was ever smart enough to explain why such a museum should be located in Enfield. After going through a fair amount of planning money, the museum proposal died a courageous death on the battleground of bad ideas.
This kind of issue can pit the historians against the tourism entrepreneurs. Boston and Brockton, Mass., recently squabbled over a new Rocky Marciano statue. Should the statue go to Brockton, the legendary boxer’s hometown, or Boston, which is way-cool and would offer up more tourists? Brockton won, just like Rocky used to win.
Hartford has museum location problems, with the Mark Twain House and the next-door Harriet Beecher Stowe House located where they were built — now a stubbornly mediocre neighborhood that has long since said goodbye to its wealthy artistes.
And the struggling crown jewel, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, is in a seemingly appropriate downtown shrine — if the potential suburban patrons didn’t prefer to avoid downtown, and if parking near the museum was not a mystery.
Proud as can be, Las Vegas city boosters have announced plans for a $48 million “mob” museum. Who can be surprised? Location, location, location.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
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