Walking with a Ghost

I attended a fantastic lecture and discussion at Eastern State Penitentiary earlier this week.

The lecture and subsequent discussion focused on the site's dependence on its haunted house, Terror Behind the Walls, which takes place from September through Halloween each year. Terror Behind the Walls has been extremely popular and brought in a full 65% of ESP's operating budget in 2010. ESP staff believe that Terror Behind the Walls allows them to operate the increasingly popular daytime, history-based tours of the site and also to make much-needed improvements to the site such as a temporary roof over one of the cell blocks. Although nearly the same number of people attended the daytime tours as did Terror Behind the Walls last year, it does seem that one supports the other. People in the audience attested to this fact.

This state of affairs, however, saddens me. I love ESP and have visited several times. The staff does an excellent job of interpreting the site and are improving the connections made between ESP and the current prison situation in this country. They care very deeply about presenting an honest and accurate look at the prison's history. I wish that the organization could sustain itself without such heavy reliance on the funds brought in through Terror Behind the Walls.

One final thought. I am very conflicted about Terror Behind the Walls. On the one hand, this event supports ESP throughout the year and ESP's staff has used the funds well. But on the other hand, Terror Behind the Walls could serve to reinforce negative stereotypes about prisons, prisoners and prison guards. ESP is stuck firmly between a rock and a hard place.

I am reminded of a story about the Philadelphia History Museum published in the New York Times last December. The museum sold some pieces from its collection in order to finance renovations and the improvement of its storage facilities, etc.

ESP and the Philadelphia History Museum seem to have raised money in the best way and attempted to use the resulting funds in the most productive and ethical way possible. But have they lost something in the process?

To Deaccession or Not to Deaccession?

According to this piece published in the New York Times earlier this week, the Philadelphia History Museum has been selling pieces from its collection to finance the first major renovations to the building since the 1940's.

The museum desperately needed to weed out some pieces from its collection. It did not have the space or the budget to care for a collection of that size. The building also needed to be renovated and updated. (Nancy Moses hints at the difficulties faced by the museum in her book Lost in the Museum: Buried Treasures and the Stories They Tell.) The museum would need to raise incredibly large sums of money in order to complete these upgrades.

I sympathize with the museum's argument that the money obtained from the sale of various historic objects goes entirely toward ensuring the preservation and safety of what remains in the collection, but the whole process leaves a sour taste in my mouth. This situation is different from other institutions making news recently for deaccessioning objects to pay for daily operating costs. I also recognize that the intentions of the museum's staff are very good. They are attempting to do what is best for the museum and its collection. But did no other options for raising money exist?

According to the "News" section on the museum's website, the museum has received various grants and other sources of funding. I find it hard to believe that these sources, as well as individual donors, were tapped before resorting to auctioning off parts of the collection to the highest bidder.

I fear that deaccessioning has become, for many museums, an easy way to fund projects that might otherwise be hard too expensive or difficult to finance rather than a means of acquiring better or more representative pieces for the collection. Deaccessioning should not be the means by which a museum funds its daily operations or its renovations.