More than art museum needs support in Roanoke

[NS Newsfeed]

Stuart Kelly

Kelly is a Virginia Museum of Transportation volunteer and a Roanoke County resident.

The Art Museum of Western Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Transportation sit blocks away from each other. And a hundred miles apart.

While the art museum erects a $66 million, ultra-modern facility and projects a multimillion-dollar annual budget, the transportation museum struggles to keep its historic building and operations afloat with a small fraction of that amount.

Whether you think the new art home is marvel or monstrosity, you cannot help but admire its vision. Continuity of leadership, clarity of purpose and consistency in funding have laid the foundation.

On the other hand, the Museum of Transportation has lacked all of these at one point or another. Now, Executive Director Bev Fitzpatrick and an enthusiastic but undermanned staff live with a train wreck not of their own making.

What difference does this tale of two museums make? Should the transportation museum's woes matter to the rest of us? Yes, for these reasons.

First, the museum's collection is central to Roanoke's heritage. Without the railroad, you might be reading the Big Lick Weekly Gazette now. For a century a major American railroad headquartered here. Even the former Norfolk and Western freight station that houses the museum handled at one time practically every piece of freight entering the city.

The museum's crown jewels, two of the finest steam locomotives ever manufactured, were built in Roanoke. The N&W was the only major railroad to design and build its own steam locomotives and the last to operate primarily by steam.

Dozens of other locomotives and rolling stock are also there, along with vintage cars and trucks, wagons and carriages, early firefighting equipment and a firefighter's memorial, an African American oral history project, a massive Lionel train layout, hundreds of pieces of railroad memorabilia, a new aviation gallery and more.

Every local museum has its strengths. The Museum of Transportation, though, says Roanoke in a way none of the others do.

Second, the museum has broad appeal. With hardly any marketing, the museum last year drew 20,000 visitors from 38 countries, a 17 percent increase from 2006. Eighty percent of admissions were to people living outside the Roanoke Valley.

More than a "blue-collar attraction" or a place visited only by "tiny tots and old railroaders," to quote some critics, the Museum of Transportation taps into a deep fascination with trains and other transportation reaching from the stock room to the board room, as the Times' feature story last year on Ray Smoot, CEO of the Virginia Tech Foundation, illustrates. In fact, I wager that more area residents would connect with the transportation museum's exhibits than those in the art museum.

Third, the museum forms a critical part of the synergy of downtown Roanoke. It is woven together with the Winston Link Museum, N&W passenger station, Hotel Roanoke, Norfolk Southern's main line operations and the linear Railwalk to form a tapestry of Roanoke's history and railway heritage.

Does it make sense to spend millions of dollars on a rail walk to tie together these elements, then to neglect the main attraction at one end?

Wouldn't that be like building a baseball diamond with no third base or pitcher's mound?

The museum is being skewered for its failures, appropriately to some degree. Yet the current leadership has already implemented several of the consultants' recommendations. Many of the others require money and added personnel to accomplish.

The transportation museum needs our help now. When a man is drowning, insisting that he learn to swim does no good until you've gotten him safely to shore.

You have to hand it to the art museum. Donors certainly have. While I hope the new creation is a huge success, it seems ironic that one entity would prosper so much while others scramble for crumbs.

Recent struggles for survival by Mill Mountain Zoo, Explore Park, Mill Mountain Theatre and other nonprofits give evidence that the transportation museum's woes are not simply the result of poor leadership. The area needs a comprehensive strategy for supporting its aesthetic institutions.

A parable of our arts and culture's future lies as near as the Norfolk Southern tracks.

Every day the finest modern locomotives roll by on those rails, flexing their muscles with thousands of horsepower.

However, these sleek beasts seldom pull a train out of town solo. As powerful as they are, they provide maximum efficiency and profitability only when they are lashed together in units of two, three or more.

Similarly, only when our various cultural attractions and supporters bind together for the common good will Roanoke achieve the maximum pull of tourist dollars.