The 49 closets at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science are bursting with giraffe skins, Tyrannosaur fossils, and Asian beetle-shell shawls. For years, museum managers have been tucking specimens in the strangest of spaces – slivers of space behind the curved back walls of dioramas and a storage room that can be entered only from a women’s restroom.
“We’re in gridlock right now,” said museum director George Sparks. “It’s like one of those puzzles you had as a kid where there’s all those squares and just one free space. We have none.”
Museums around the nation – from the Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to the Field Museum in Chicago – are filling up, and each is trying to find ways to build more space.
Unlike those institutions, the Denver museum’s approach to the problem involves taxes and proposed bond issues set for a vote next month.
If the issues 1G and 1H pass, along with seven others up for a vote, the owner of a $255,000 home in Denver would pay an additional tax of $63 per year.
That would mean about $50 million for the museum, including $20 million for general maintenance, such as repairs to a leaky roof and asbestos removal.
Another $30 million will be for a new collection storage facility and education wing.
In other recent capital projects, museums around the country have tended to raise most money privately, sometimes with help from state or city general funds, but with no direct impact on taxpayers.
To be sure, comparisons are tricky because every museum is unique, said Larry Dubinski, a vice president with the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia.
The Franklin raised $61.7 million in 2003 – mostly from private donors – to build eight new exhibit spaces.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania added $24.5 million, Dubinski said, because the museum draws visitors statewide.
The Franklin had nearly 1.6 million visitors last year, similar to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
The Philadelphia institution has little in the way of collections, while Denver stores more than one million items – a figure that grows daily, Sparks said.
For example, last week, bugs in the museum’s dermestid beetle colony were busy making a museum-quality skeleton of a Mongolian horse that died at the Denver Zoo.
Both the skeleton and a sample of the horse’s tissue will be stored for future study.
“The point is you don’t know; 100 years from now it may be extinct,” Krell said.
The museum holds the skull of the last grizzly bear seen in Colorado, an old female killed by the hunter she attacked the San Juan Mountains in 1979.
The skull sits in a room with no sprinklers, where boxes stacked high on shelves touch the ceiling.
“For 200 years we have been collecting stuff,” Sparks said. “We are now realizing how important it is, and how tenuous.”
The museum plans to raise $90 million from private donors in the next decade for upgrades that would include a new entrance, Sparks said.
“But it’s hard to ask a donor for money for storage,” he said.
The National Air and Space Museum, which recently completed the first phase of an expansion project in Virginia, raised $185 million privately, said Claire Brown, the museum’s director of communications.
Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History spent $82 million in 2005 for its new Collections Resource Center, 186,000 square feet for collections storage and work space.
“We have about 22 million artifacts and specimens,” said Nancy O’Shea, the Field Museum director of public relations. “We had just run out of space.”
About $47 million of the Field’s money came from state bonds, which required no taxpayer vote. The rest came from state and federal grants and gifts.
The University of Colorado Museum, in Boulder, relied on state higher education funds – and a $1 million gift – for the face-lift of the Museum Collections Building in 2002, said Tom Ranker, the museum’s interim director.
The museum maintains a growing collection of more than 4 million artifacts, scattered in a handful of Boulder campus buildings.
“Already, we need more space,” Ranker said. “It’s the nature of an active museum. If you’re not growing, you’re not doing your job.”
Katy Human: 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com
