Playtime Is Over

Eight years ago, they abandoned one of Los Angeles’s most popular museums. The Children’s Museum of L.A. attracted 200,000 kids a year, from all over L.A. and as far away as Ventura County, to its central location near City Hall. It was a relatively small, simple place, intensely kid-friendly, an early, happily modest creation of mega-architect Frank Gehry. Its white structure still looms over the 101.

Over 21 years, it had become one of the city’s cultural gemstones. Yellow school buses parked bumper to bumper around the civic center every day, and the nearby City Mall was full of the shrieks of delighted elementary schoolkids. The museum described itself as a place “where kids can touch the world, to touch, handle, feel, wear, ride, probe, construct, design, and otherwise discover the museum’s many exhibits.”

Now it’s dark and empty. If anything, it was a victim of its own success, since the pretence for its closing was that it could no longer handle the number of visitors it was generating. A new Children’s Museum, over three times its size, has sprung up on a city-donated acre on a far and fair northeastern parkland about a mile from L.A.’s Northeastern city limit – but it’s dark and empty too. The new museum’s promised opening dates have been gradually pushed back five years, from 2005 to June 2010, while fundraising for the museum is $26 million shy of covering its costs.

Cecilia Aguilar-Glassman is affable and busy, a former staffer to Mayor Dick Riordan now charged with directing the Children’s Museum. She says the $26 million will go toward completing the museum’s new, high-tech exhibits and the innovative Sara Graham-designed building and site. With a proposed 22 fulltime and 66 part-time staffers, CMLA will also need an estimated $5 million per year to operate – 40 percent from donations, the rest from a projected 360,000 admissions per year (or more than twice those claimed by the L.A. Museum of Natural History). It seems ... optimistic.

Eighteen months into her job, Aguilar allows that, minus an anonymous $10 million donation a year ago, the entire project could have collapsed, ending a decade of hopes and promises of a proposal whose dual objectives – as a working kids’ museum and a showy Valley landmark – often seemed to collide. At first, the museum was to be an expansion of the old play-hard downtown CMLA, with an additional satellite branch in the culturally deprived San Fernando Valley. In 2003, the downtown proposal died, sending nearly $5 million worth of advance design work down the drain.

But in the wake of the Valley Secession vote, perhaps as a sop to Valley pride, the satellite museum morphed into a cost-no-object cultural icon planned as 80,000-square-feet of pricey green building five times the size of the shuttered downtown original. The new museum, board chair and theater mogul Bruce Corwin said in 2005, would become “a Disney Hall for the Valley.”

While Aguilar stresses that the Hansen Dam site, near Lakeview Terrace, is “just 25 freeway minutes from the Westside,” it’s obviously even closer to Pacoima, Sunland, North Hollywood, and other culturally parched San Fernando Valley areas. But it is a lot further from, say, Watts. Or Boyle Heights. Or South L.A. Whose councilwoman, Jan Perry, says sourly: “Funny they didn’t think of that.” Aguilar stresses there’s interest in the museum from closer places like Santa Clarita and the Antelope and San Gabriel valleys. But the latter already has perhaps the region’s best children’s museum – Pasadena’s Kidspace, which claims 250,000 visitors a year, according to spokeswoman Tracy Bechtold. It also has community backing CMLA supporters can only dream of – from Caltech, the affluent Pasadena Junior League, and the Pasadena school district. And officials of Los Angeles, which has both a fiscal and administrative stake in CMLA, might well question its emphasizing attendance from outside the city.

I can envision it as a destination point,” said its biggest political supporter, then-City Council President (and now state Senator) Alex Padilla, while admitting, “Very few people go out of their way to visit the area.”

The project was already years behind schedule, and its original $100 million fundraising goal culminated in a total of $7 million by last year. The museum’s director then was one Mark Dierking, who lacked museum fundraising or administration experience – but he had been a senior staffer in Padilla’s office. Even seriously downsized, and minus the originally planned downtown campus, the Valley proposal alone cost $55 million. Here’s when the purpose of the museum morphed from a kids’ educational-recreational facility to a Valley cultural showpiece, complete with spectacular architectural details that now may never materialize. Aguilar now rues the Disney comparison, which, she says, was intended to stress the similarly delayed history of the Disney project. But it’s hard to compare a $275 million international Frank Gehry landmark with ticket price points passing $500 with a $50 million play space for youngsters whose last posted admission price was $5. Most importantly, Disney Hall had the support of the Disney family and company, whose reported paying of half the costs assured the fundraising’s triumphant completion. There’s no such muscle behind the Children’s Museum, which late last year announced it was recruiting a new board of directors with members capable of tapping new funding sources and even money of their own. “People with fresh Rolodexes,” said Aguilar.

Some current board members – including Corwin – did not return calls asking for comment. Honorary emeritus chair – and local power attorney – Doug Ring should be credited with saying early that the museum oughtn’t be compared to Disney. He now says he found funding the museum to be a hard sell. “Due to back surgery,” he didn’t recall details of the original fundraising effort.

Certainly, no one has celebrated its success. Not speaking for attribution, others involved in the Dierking era say they found few CMLA donors in the Valley while, said one, “People on the Westside simply didn’t relate to the project.” The museum spent over $4 million on professional fundraising with meager results. Some blamed the problem on the post 9/11 mood. A more likely factor was competition by an unprecedented, billion-dollar tsunami of Greater L.A. nonprofit fundraising around 2002 – including nine-figure capital efforts by both LACMA and the Museum of Natural History and eight-figure programs by Disney itself, Pasadena’s Art Center, the Skirball Center, the Hammer Gallery, and even the Petersen Auto Museum. The big contributions CMLA then reaped were mostly what one professional fundraiser called “the low hanging fruit” – million-dollar donations from the usual good guys: the Keck, Weingart, Annenberg, and California Community foundations. Future CMLA fund seekers will probably have to look elsewhere for more.

Aguilar said that a new board chair would be named by December, followed by a new board that would have roughly a year to raise most of the needed $26 million by the March 2010 opening – a daunting task, minus the likes of last year’s $10 million contribution. In the first nine months since that donation, she says she’s raised nearly $1.3 million – compared to $800,000 raised in the same period before she arrived – but at that pace, they simply can’t make it. In June, Riordan and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa teamed up, basically, to ask their rich friends to dig down deep for the CMLA. So far, there’s little indication they have. Meanwhile, pitching for donations and donors has become a huge part of Aguilar’s job (she declined to state her salary, but her predecessor earned $128,000 per year plus $38,000 in benefits). Abby Arnold, a Westside nonprofit consultant long familiar with the CMLA, questions this strategy. “The museum would be better off hiring a fundraising professional and giving Ms. Aguilar more time to do the administrative stuff – the hiring, the exhibit preparation – before the museum can open.”

It seems very possible the city could step in (again) to help. A surprise multimillion-dollar 2007 CMLA shortfall sparked a city audit that found that 67 percent – or $17 million – of the funding for the supposedly private-side museum came from public sources. (Aguilar says the subsequent $10 million private donation has rebalanced the funding ratio. Her own fundraising also covered the shortfall.) These included most of the city’s 1996 Prop. K parks and culture initiative funding.

But when Controller Laura Chick told Aguilar about her problems with CMLA, the response, oddly enough, came not from Aguilar but from three top city officials – Jimmy Blackman from the Mayor’s Office, then-Chief Administrative Officer Karen Sissons, and Chief Legislative Analyst Jerry Miller, who make up an ad hoc committee administering funds from Prop. K. Although the trio agreed with Chick’s recommendation that the museum must wean itself from public funding, the fact that these top city administrators were there on the museum’s behalf was inauspicious. The audit report itself mentions an escape plan that would hand the museum over to city management if it fails in its present form; the problem is that this would cost taxpayers lots and that, if the Olvera Street El Pueblo’s history is an indication, L.A.’s public-private museum partnerships tend to be disastrous.

Said Councilman Richard Alarcon, who requested the audit and whose district includes the project: “I am less optimistic than realistic. But we can’t let this fail. There is too much at stake to let it fail.”