The Boston Museum
The Boston Museum is a planned history museum for the city of Boston, Massachusetts. The Museum will bring the region's 400-year history into focus, inspiring local residents and visitors from across the globe to explore Boston’s rich heritage, historic sites and cultural attractions. A 100,000-square-foot (9,300 m2) museum and marketplace concept is now in active development, with additional plans for a low-lying pedestrian bridge to serve as a gateway to the museum and a critical connector of park parcels along the Rose Kennedy Greenway. It will be located in the heart of downtown Boston, adjacent to the Rose Kennedy Greenway and the Freedom Trail, and located near to Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The Boston Museum will collaborate and develop partnerships with schools, universities, libraries, museums, research institutes, and civic organizations. The museum promises to be a forum, a gateway for extending value to the community.
The planned building will be designed by Cambridge Seven Associates. The proposal includes five core exhibition galleries, a gallery for national touring exhibitions, an all-purpose theater space, educational spaces, a City Room, a groundfloor marketplace, and a green roof.
Since approximately March 2010, Rose Kennedy Greenway planners believed the Greenway was for natural attractions and not bulky buildings. Boston Museum planners, including CEO Frank Keefe is now looking for another location off the Greenway.[1]
The museum has a nickname: "BoMu".
Core galleries
- Place Over Time tells the story of the ecological and economic transformation of Massachusetts.
- Conscience and Confrontation explores the periodic eruption of political contention ruling Massachusetts, which has often set an agenda for political change across the nation and the globe.
- People of the Bay explores the succession of cultures, from native peoples through the latest wave of immigrants, as they create personal, family, community, and inter-group experiences in this region.
- Innovation Odyssey will focus on the region’s many breakthroughs and “firsts” that have had a global reach, spreading liberty and the abolition of slavery, advancing the causes of universal education and expanded health care, igniting both the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age.
- Sports Town is envisioned as an entry point for visitors who may not see themselves as typical museum-goers. They are drawn into the gallery - and the museum beyond - because exhibit content relates to their lifelong passion of sports, which has many "firsts" is Massachusetts.
Educational mission
The Boston Museum will broaden and deepen the appreciation of Boston as a "living classroom" and campus for thematic learning through partnerships with other historic sites and cultural institutions, sharing best practices and working in concert to create new programming and enrichment activities for educators and students throughout the region. We will also reach out to national audiences through extensive use of electronic links and new media technology.
The Boston Museum will be a transformative educational experience for learners of all ages and styles. Its galleries will use a wide variety of approaches aimed at engaging families, school children and adults at all stages of life. Most importantly, the stories visitors encounter will have personal resonance, whether of ancestors arriving on Long Wharf or their own physical relationship to the place of Boston.
Board of directors
- Louis Miller - Boston Museum Board Chairman; Rackemann, Sawyer & Brewster
- Roger Berkowitz - President and CEO, Legal Sea Foods
- Janey Bishoff - Bishoff Communications
- Janice Bourque
- William M. Bulger - President Emeritus, University of Massachusetts
- Jill Ker Conway - President Emerita, Smith College
- Ralph Cooper - Veterans Benefits Clearinghouse
- Callie Crossley - WGBH Commentator
- Anne D. Emerson - President Emerita, Boston Museum
- David Feigenbaum - Senior Principal, Fish & Richardson
- John Fish - CEO, Suffolk Construction
- Ronald Lee Fleming - Founder, Townscape Institute
- Richard M. Freeland - Massachusetts Commissioner of Higher Education
- William Galatis - Dunkin' Brands Franchisee
- Perrin M. Grayson, Esq.
- Frank Keefe - CEO, Boston Museum
- Don Law - President, Live Nation - New England
- Alyce J. Lee
- Tunney Lee - Professor Emeritus, Senior Lecturer, MIT
- Kevin McCall - CEO, Paradigm Properties
- Jane Manopoli Patterson
- James E. Rooney - Massachusetts Convention Center Authority
- William B. Tyler - Chairman Emeritus - Board; Rackemann, Sawyer & Brewster
- James B. White - President Emeritus -Board; Elaw Corporation
- Linda Whitlock - Former Nicholas President & CEO, Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston
- J. David Wimberly - Chairman Emeritus, Frontier Capital Management
National Advisory Committee
- Lou Casagrande - Dean of Education, Social Work, Child Life and Family Studies, Wheelock College
- Spencer R. Crew - Executive Director and CEO, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
- Drew Gilpin Faust - President, Harvard University
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Director, W.E.B. DuBois Institute, Harvard University
- David Gergen - Director, Center for Public Leadership, Harvard University
- Doris Kearns Goodwin - Historian/ Author
- Marian L. Heard - President and Chief Executive Officer, Oxen Hill Partners
- Michael Patrick MacDonald - Author/ Activist
- Thomas H. O'Connor - Professor Emeritus/ University Historian, Boston College
- Nathaniel Philbrick - Author
- Robert D. Putnam - Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University
- Elizabeth Shannon - Writer/ Teacher/ Administrator, Boston University
- Cathy Douglas Stone, Esq.
- Margot Stern Strom - Executive Director, Facing History and Ourselves
- Andrew Viterbi - President, The Viterbi Group
Project Consultants
- Richard Rabinowitz, Chief Historian
- Cambridge Seven Associates, Architecture
- Mikyoung Kim Design, Landscsape Architecture
- Boston History and Innovation Collaborative, Content for Innovation Gallery and other galleries
- ConsultEcon, Inc., Economic Feasibility Consultants
References
External links