A museum downtown

Partnerships for Healthy Communities has done its homework in working to create a children’s museum in Bangor. A new feasibility study shows the project to be highly feasible. The business plan is realistic. The newly hired exhibit designer is brimming with exciting ideas. Start-up fund-raising exceeded expectations. A series of public meetings during the past year generated phenomenal public support.

The concept is there. Now it’s time to talk bricks and mortar.

The museum needs a building. If it is to fulfill its dual role of stimulating both young minds and the local economy, it needs a building downtown.

And to get that, it needs an angel. An angel with roughly 18,000-square feet of vacant space, ample parking and a generous spirit.

Such a request should not be all that startling. Of the 144 children’s museums nationwide (the fastest-growing sector of the museum industry, by the way), fully one-fourth are in donated buildings, receive free rent or enjoy extremely favorable leases. Downtown Bangor has several adequate and vacant properties — all it needs is one beneficent property owner. The Bangor City Council, which already has been extraordinarily supportive both in word and deed (a $25,000 contribution to the start-up), can help by giving serious consideration to any reasonable request for assistance.

It would be far easier to build this museum in the crook of an I-95 exit ramp, but the result would a museum that fails to live up to its full potential. LORD Cultural Resources Planning & Management Inc., the outfit that did the feasibility study, notes that 35 percent of children’s museums are part of downtown revitalization projects and as such are more likely to receive corporate, government and community support, support that, in the long run, far outweighs the initial ease of building in the suburbs.

Chicago-based architect Peter Exley will design the exhibits. If the exhibits he’s cooked up for children’s museums throughout the Midwest are any indication, Bangor’s will be chock full of hands-on, fun, slightly messy and a little bit noisy learning, with a strong emphasis upon science, the arts and Maine history and culture. Such activities should be as far away from the video arcades and multiplex cinemas of interstateland as possible.

If done right, LORD says the museum will draw about 70,000 visitors a year from the enormous northern and central Maine region. That’s a lot of kids, parents and teachers, a lot of mouths for restaurants to feed, a lot for shoppers. They belong downtown and the children’s museum can get them there.