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Reviving history: The forgotten History Center tries to attract attention
Sunday, February 28, 1999 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Almost three years after opening in a renovated Strip District ice warehouse, the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center is struggling with declining attendance, low visibility and exhibits that aren't geared enough to the children who compose a large segment of its audience.
The center now has a plan that lays out strategies it believes will not only solve these and other problems, but also turn the center into a top regional attraction.
Andrew E. Masich, who joined the center in July as president and chief executive officer, has been working with about 100 staffers, consultants and community advisers to put together the five-year plan, shaped in part by studies and focus groups that revealed the center's strengths and weaknesses.
Key to the plan's success are partnerships with other museums, a new marketing effort and internal improvements designed to attract audiences that have little awareness of the center or perceive it as stodgy and boring.
Also outlined are plans for a performance and lecture hall, a gallery large enough to accommodate traveling exhibits, a rooftop restaurant and more storage space for the center's burgeoning collections.
To realize all of its dreams, the center will have to raise $10 million in the next five years over and above its $3.2 million annual budget. The center is counting on support from federal, state and local government, private foundations and income from its growing endowment, now at $13 million but targeted at $20 million.
The plan details ways to increase revenues 129 percent by 2004, with growth in all funding streams, including grants and earned income. In addition, capital campaigns could be mounted for specific building projects, development director Audrey Brourman said.
"We're not dependent on any one [source], but we need all of them, as well as the partners for in-kind services that allow us to do things economically. It's a pretty complex picture of funding and partnerships that makes the history center run," Masich said.
The center will launch programs and events designed to bring in new audiences, such as a "History Uncorked" party next month for young professionals.
In a random telephone survey last year, 2 percent of heads of households in Western Pennsylvania who had never visited the center identified it without prompting as one of the region's top 16 cultural attractions. Only the Frick Art & Historical Center scored lower, with a 1 percent "unaided awareness" among nonpatrons.
This year, the history center is expected to draw about 82,000 people, down from 102,873 last year and 152,342 the first year.
The center's drop in attendance is not unusual, said Terry Davis, director of the American Association for State and Local History.
"It's not only normal but one of the biggest issues that we're talking about on a national basis. There's so much hullabaloo in the press, and with the planning and fund raising, people are anxious to see the new museum, but then it becomes old news or just regular news," Davis said. "The things that Andy Masich is doing, with focus groups to see what is not working, are exactly the kind of efforts that must happen . . . to bring the community back again."
The center opened in May 1996 without a strategic organizational plan or an aggressive marketing plan.
It struggled through budget problems and the sudden dismissal of its founding director, John Herbst. And, as the new long-range plan acknowledges, the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center carries a name that is long and confusing.
In a random-sample mail survey the center conducted last year of 1,500 of its 4,000 members, 74 percent of the 428 members who returned the surveys expressed satisfaction with exhibits and programs.
But the long-range plan also states that the center hasn't done enough to attract new visitors.
Forging partnerships
Masich hopes to turn that around with a marketing plan designed to increase awareness of the center.
Partnering - teaming with schools, museums, heritage groups, local historical societies and other institutions for mutual benefit - will play a big role in shaping the center's future, and Masich has spent a lot of time working out such agreements. The University of Pittsburgh, for example, will make available an online catalog of the center's library.
The center also is teaming with the Civic Light Opera to develop a series of operas based on regional history that will be performed at the center and then at schools.
Masich has talked with the Steel Industry Heritage Corp. and Pittsburgh Voyager about collaborating on historical tours of the rivers. A partnership with the Allegheny Intermediate Unit will have its trucks and vans delivering the center's curriculum kits to schools.
And Masich and Carnegie Science Center Director Seddon Bennington have come up with the idea of playing host to out-of-town school groups on a two-day visit to Pittsburgh, with a day spent at each museum and a sleep-over at one.
History center and science center staffers also will write the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Kids Corner feature, each taking two days a week beginning April 5.
"That's what I've been doing for the last six months - meeting with movers and shakers and people with good ideas, and sorting out which ideas we can run with and which can be put on the back burner because we can't do everything at once," Masich said.
The marketing plan, to be implemented by the center's new marketing director, Pam Pochapin, aims to increase attendance by 32 percent by the end of fiscal 2001, from 82,000 to 108,200, and by 84 percent, to 150,750, by fiscal 2004.
"We're going to position ourselves to be top-of-mind when families consider their entertainment options," Masich said, adding that it was a bold move to add the word entertainment to the center's new mission statement.
In a high-tech age, the center's exhibits are mostly low-tech, with objects and room environments interpreted primarily by labels. While the "Points in Time" exhibit on Western Pennsylvania history also features video and aural presentations and an interactive television quiz, there is too much "reading the wall," as the long-range plan quotes one visitor.
While school groups report that they are generally pleased with their visits to the center, they also say exhibits are not reaching out enough to young visitors.
The history center attracted 15,000 children in school groups last year, while more than 60,000 visited the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and 108,000 went to the Carnegie Science Center.
"Interactivity doesn't just mean computer touch-screen stuff," Masich said. "They want to be able to walk into exhibits, like the Kennywood roller coaster" featured in "Points in Time." "They want to get in that, and they want it to clack-clack-clack like it does at Kennywood. Why don't we do that? We can do it so we don't hurt it as an artifact, but still let people enjoy it."
School groups make up 18 percent of the center's target audience, and families with children compose 40 percent. That means nearly two-thirds of the center's target audience includes children, a good reason to better tailor the exhibits to their needs.
"By 2002, we're projecting we're going to double our school group attendance to 30,000," education director Ann Fortescue said. "By 2004, we should be triple what we are now."
The center also wants to mount changing exhibits that will give its audience a reason to keep coming back. About 80 percent of its visitors come from Western Pennsylvania.
"They are interested in their neighborhoods and things that are close to home," Masich said.
Audience research revealed that Pittsburghers also are intrigued by subjects that have some drama and mystery.
"How about [an exhibit on] the B-25 that crashed in the Mon? You know people would come out for that. Or if we talked about the fourth river, or things that were found under your house. It's how you tell the story."
Other topics under consideration include Old World roots, Pittsburgh neighborhoods, ethnic groups and religions, professional sports teams, steel making, shooting of "Hollywood" films here, high technology, the history of the rivers and the Civil War in Western Pennsylvania.
Surveys have shown there is another market to be tapped: out-of-town couples over age 35 without children, the group that seeks out opportunities for cultural tourism.
"We're not getting nearly as many of those visitors as we want," Masich said.
On March 12, the center will launch "History Uncorked," a party and fund-raiser intended to attract young professionals. Modeled after the Carnegie Museums' "Carnegie Untapped" party and similar events around the country, "History Uncorked" will feature bands, dancing, food, wine and beer, and admission to all of the center's exhibits.
Visitors who do make it through the center's front door find themselves in a big, high-ceilinged, dimly lit room that is mostly empty - good for parties and receptions but bad for first impressions.
Masich said that when he entered the Great Hall last summer for his job interview, the museum's "entrance experience" struck him as "a little bit on the dark side, dark and hard and not as inviting as I would have liked it. We need to provide an experience that's warmer, colorful, more inviting."
To that end, an "orientation robot" will greet visitors, give them a tour of the Great Hall and let them know with sound and video bites what is on each floors.
Designed and built by RedZone Robotics in the Strip District, "It will let people know Pittsburgh is a headquarters for robotics research in the world," Masich said. "We don't want to forget that we have our eyes on the future, and we're using the past to get there."
Elsewhere in the Great Hall, the "drum" that formerly housed Douglas Cooper's mural of Pittsburgh will be transformed by 2000 into an "object theater," an introductory multimedia presentation with videos, artifacts and fiber-optic lighting.
The Cooper mural, removed in the fall to make way for a temporary display of teddy bears, will be reinstalled elsewhere in the center.
Expansion plans
The center's building, constructed in 1898, presents challenges also addressed in the plan.
"As wonderful as it is, it has real limitations because it is a historic structure," Masich said.
"In some ways, it would have been a lot easier and better to build something from scratch, and build it to accommodate a history museum."
Because there is no entrance big enough for large objects, for example, a new one will be created by opening one of the old warehouse's wooden doors to the back alley this year.
In 2004, the center plans to build a performance and lecture hall seating up to 300 people, a gallery with high ceilings and unobstructed floor space large enough to accommodate traveling exhibits, a rooftop restaurant and additional collections storage space.
The center also wants to establish better connections with Downtown, the David L. Lawrence Convention Center and the Strip District, with a walking "history trail" and a vehicular "cultural shuttle."
As for that long and confusing name, there is no plan to change it. But look for the center to use the nickname most people call it - the Heinz History Center - in some of its advertising.
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