Move the National Capital Trolley Museum to Washington, DC.

Streetcar at the Peace Monument Loop, U.S. Capitol, 1961. Image from the National Capital Trolley Museum website.

Entry: Sunday September 17, 2006

The Sunday Post has a piece, "On a Collision Course with the ICC," by the development director of the National Capital Trolley Museum, highlighting the fact that the Museum is endangered by the Inter County Connector freeway which is to be built in northern Montgomery County, Maryland.

I don't know how much acreage the Museum takes, but I do have a response:

Move the National Capital Trolley Museum to Washington, DC.

According to the letter, the Museum is happy with receiving 300 visitors/week on average, and of course, their rent free situation being co-located at the Northwest Branch Park in the Montgomery County Park System. I can't blame them for wanting to stay where they pay no rent, but I would expect that they would get much greater attendance were they located in the city.

And I have ideas about hitting up companies like Alstom and Bombardier and working with the American Public Transportation Association to finance the move. And this doesn't even get into a comparative analysis of these kinds of transit museums, such as the New York Transit Museum (see its list of programs).

I wrote this a couple weeks ago about the Transportation exhibit and the now closed for renovation Smithsonian Museum of American History.
-----------------------------------------
Musing about the narrative of Washington DC

An old friend and her family were in town, so I spent some time with them over the past couple days going to museums. It's always good to do this, because you look at the various institutions, services, the way people are treated, etc., with fresh eyes.

So this forced me to run around the Smithsonian National Museum of American History before it closed for renovation. And I hate to admit I hadn't been to the Transportation exhibit, "America on the Move."I think it was pretty good, although not much different from the exhibit a few years ago on transit at the National Building Museum (maybe 2002?), except that the NMAH exhibit goes beyond the Washington region.

But a chunk of the exhibit focuses on Washington, DC, around 1900, on how people got around (streetcars, carriages) how goods were transported, the Center Market and "farm to market" issues, as well as the beginnings of suburban development.
"What Happened to Streetcars," interpretation board, American on the Move exhibit, Smithsonian Museum of American History.

The NBM exhibit of a few years ago organized the narrative in four phases of development in the region:

the walking city;
the transit city;
the suburban city; and
the regional city;

looking at how people organized their lives around mobility, and the land use patterns that developed.

In some respects the NMAH exhibit uses the same kind of narrative, although it looks at these issues nationally as well as at the dimension of travel and migration--so you get shipping and container ships, development of the national road system and the Interstates, travel and tourism, Route 66 kind of stuff.

I raise this because I wonder if that kind of narrative is the way to organize exhibits about Washington, DC and the region, and its history--around mobility and land use patterns, addding various dimensions and threads, from schooling and education to race and civil rights.

I have been thinking about how such issues relate to a revitalized "city museum" and how it could interpret the history of the city.


Index Keywords: cultural-heritage-tourism; museums