James P. Vaughan
This lecture was presented as the first in a series of lectures sponsored by the Heritage Philadelphia Program, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by the University of the Arts. The speaker was James P. Vaughan, Vice President for Stewardship at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The lecture was presented at Christ Church in Philadelphia, PA on Feb. 1, 2006.
(DS) Donald Smith, Executive Director of the Christ Church Preservation Trust, welcomed everyone. He commented that the church was undergoing renovations, and installing a fire safety system. The (Christ Church) Trust is engaged in a campaign to carry out needed preservation on the tower room and steeple of the Church. Smith then introduced Barbara Silberman, Executive Director of the Heritage Philadelphia Program.
(BWS) Silberman introduced Vaughan’s remarks by commenting on how deeply people care about the historic house museums in their communities because as a whole, they represent the domestic life of our society. Silberman noted that for generations, the only way to preserve a building was to develop it as a historic house museum. She went on to say that today that paradigm is changing because the number of house museums in the United States is growing at an exponential rate. Those who work to save these treasures quickly realize that operating money is scarce; operating money has to be raised every year and that the fundraising process is daunting. Silberman pointed out that each year, repair and maintenance costs rise, while the number of volunteers and visitors continues to decline. Most boards want to hire staff to do the hands-on work of stewardship and fund-raising. But staff costs, particularly for wages and compensation are rising. Private philanthropy for historic houses in this country is declining. If an historic house has 2,000 visitors each year and spends $150,000 on operations, and needs $50,000 in repairs and maintenance, then the average cost per visitor is roughly $1,000. Who charges even 10% of that cost? Regardless of visitation, however, there is often little funding or little or no endowment to preserve the historic house itself.
(BWS) Silberman said that given these challenges, many individuals and organizations are facing these difficulties realistically and looking for new ways to preserve these important structures. Throughout this series, some of the leading preservationists in the United States will discuss what they are doing now to preserve these resources for the future. What's happening with historic houses today is a seismic shift, a transfer of stewardship from one generation to the next. It's a big change. Change is hard and it's all around us. Some people embrace it, some people avoid it, and some people live in fear about it, but it's inevitable. In the last few decades Americans have faced enormous changes in daily life that affect their safety and security, their roles at home and in the workplace, even the pace of a nation that is no longer agrarian in nature. For many people, denial is the answer to this vexing set of problems associated with historic house museums, but denial will not ensure the legacy that both the buildings and those associated with them deserve. The work, dedication, commitment, and love for these treasured places can't endure unless there is planning for the future, that encompasses realistic choices about how to preserve these buildings.
Within the next decade many historic houses will lose their stewards and their audiences. In thinking about what the speakers are saying, please consider ensuring the legacy of those who have devoted their lives to the preservation of these significant places. I hope that the remarks this evening will sets of remarks this evening give you an idea of what the possibilities are, what the excitement is, what the opportunities are for making sure that the buildings you love and treasure are here long after all of us are gone.
Tonight I'm really delighted to present a colleague and a friend, Jim Vaughan, who is the vice president for stewardship at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Jim travels around the country, looks at lots of historic houses for both business and pleasure. I think that we both get lots of call every week about people who are interested in starting new historic houses, and we both pretty much say, not a good idea, here's some other things you might want to try. Jim is also the former director of the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's home in Tennessee, and I believe a former Hagley fellow.
(JV) It's a pleasure for me to be here, and I want this presentation to be the start of a conversation, not a lecture, certainly not a sermon. So let me say that what I'm going to talk about is based on 29 years of my own personal experience working with historic sites, largely with historic house museums, but also based on lots of discussions over those 29 years with other people in the profession and their views about where we are and what's going on. I'll begin by looking at the way the public evaluates the work that we do, and then I'll try to share with you what I think are some sort of consensus views from senior leaders in the field. Once I've defined the problem that we're facing, I want to talk about a few of the most common solutions that we've been trying for several decades that just don't seem to work. And then finally, I want to suggest a variety of responses that I think we should be exploring and some of which we're trying at the Trust right now, recognizing that there isn't a single right answer to what we should be -- how we should be developing our historic sites, but rather that each site needs to look at its own assets and its own resources and its own environment to determine what's the right solution for them as we move forward into the 21st century. But before we get into these practical matters, I have two questions I want to ask you. With reference to the sites that you're associated with, I ask the following: In today's marketplace, what is your compelling difference? And I'll come back to that because I think one of the problems that we face is that a lot of us are doing the same thing in a fairly redundant fashion. Unless we have a compelling difference from the sites around us, we probably won't thrive and succeed. The second question is a little more personal and maybe a little autobiographical, and that's the question, how do we as people become who we are? So, how did you become who you are? I ask this because I think it's related to the mission and the programs that we offer at historic sites. We're in the business of offering what I call cultural experiences, and you've probably read a lot about the experience economy. One writer answered this question, how do we become who we are, in the following way: "We engage ourselves in the culture that calls us with a narrative larger than our own and then battered but enlightened, we come away less arrogant and ready at last to learn." And the point that I'll try to make tonight is that I think that's really what our mission is all about. We need to be sure that we're offering people an experience that's bigger than their own in order to add some value to their life, and if we do that, I don't think we'll have to worry about how many people come to our doors. But let me go back, as I said, and begin with the public evaluation of our work, and to do that, I'm going to suggest that we use the same measure that we all worry about every day, which is attendance. Over the past few years, the media have been full of articles about declining museum and historic site attendance. Whatever happened to if you build it, they will come? I don't know. Well, let me just cite a few recent headlines. These are all from the last year.
“With costs high and attendance low, many museums are finding the need to scale back.” Boston Globe, May, 2005.
“Museum quietly slid into insolvency.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May, 2005.
“A historic replica retrenches.” Boston Globe, November, 2005. “Why rural museums are becoming ancient history.” New York Times, December, 2005.
I could literally spend the whole night giving you headline quotes about declining attendance at museums. Now I'm going to give you a couple of examples. At Colonial Williamsburg, they recently announced the closing after 25 years of work and millions of dollars of investment of the Carter's Grove Plantation. That includes the plantation house, the archaeological site, the multimillion archaeological museum, the reconstructed slave community, and the carriage road. This has been a real major focus of Williamsburg for several decades. They stated that it was too expensive to maintain for a declining number of visitors. You probably are aware that at old Sturbridge Village, the tavern that they opened in 2001 has now been closed, and the lodge which has been open for decades and other facilities are closing due to declining attendance. In my own town of Washington, D.C., the $20 million brand new museum, the City Museum, opened and closed in 15 months after having drawn only 26,000 visitors. A dozen other large museums, including the Milwaukee Public Museum, have closed in the last several years. There's a group of outdoor history museums that's been collecting and sharing attendance for more than three decades, and it includes places like Plymouth Plantation, Colonial Williamsburg, Mystic Seaport, Old Sturbridge Village, and Strawbery Banke. If you look at their attendance patterns, one thing is clear; that is, that the attendance has been steadily declining, slowly but surely, for more than 20 years at all of these sites. These are the biggest and best known historic sites in America. They have the biggest marketing budgets, the biggest development staffs. They have the most powerful and best connected boards, but they're still not financially sustainable. The National Trust which has -- we have about 20 sites that have a long enough attendance history. We actually have as of today 28 sites, but eight of them have been added in the last few years, so I'm looking at the first 20, and when we look at their attendance patterns, all except two of those 20 sites have the same declining attendance. It's not big, it's two or three percent a year, but you spread that out over 20 years and it makes a real impact on your budget and your operations. By the way, the two exceptions to our patterns are Drayton Hall and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and my theory about why they're both beating the trend is they tell great stories. They tell narratives larger than our own, and they have a compelling difference and they know what it is and they build on it. I'm guessing that if you're here, your attendance may be declining too, and I'm here to tell you that it may not be your fault. Then again, maybe it is. But let's just agree that it's part of national phenomena that people are not coming to history sites in the same numbers that they did a decade or two decades ago. It's clear to me that the public is delivering us a message.
The message is that our basic offerings, which for most of us is, usually a guided historic house tour, don’t matter to that public. And they don’t matter whether the focus is on decorative arts or social history or an exciting story of a local family. What they're telling us, historic house museums do not compete with the variety of other ways they could spend their time and their money. They're telling us that the experiences we provide are not very relevant or important to their lives. Now that's a painful message, folks, and we're going to have to figure out how to respond to it. I think in one sense we shouldn't be too surprised about this. The basic historic house tour was invented by the Ladies Mt. Vernon Association before the Civil War, and with the possible exception of audio wands and a few other technical devices, we really haven't changed it much in 150 years, and the world around us has changed. Well, if that's what the public thinks about the work that we do, what do "senior museum professionals" think about the work we do? Well, my comments here are based on part on discussions of a three day conference that we held at Kykuit, one of the Trust conference centers in 2002. The National Trust and AASLH invited about 28 people who we saw as seniors in the profession to try to look at “Rethinking the Historic House Museum for the 21st Century.” One of the things that was maybe not surprising was how quickly we reached agreement about a number of the problems that historic house museums face, and here's some of them of the things that we concluded. One, there are too many historic house museums. We're slicing a shrinking pie smaller and smaller, leaving us each with a smaller and smaller piece. We compete for attendance, for dollars, for volunteers, and we too often tell the same stories and offer the same programs as fellow nearby historic sites. The group recommended that we give increased attention as a profession to encouraging mergers, collaborations and even planned closings. Now if we were in the for-profit world, the marketplace would have taken care of this for us because if there are too many car producers, some of them eventually don't sell enough cars and they go out of business. But in the nonprofit world, we have an ability to keep believing and keep raising money and trying to struggle through. Our professionals also agreed that most of our basic tours were boring. They said that most guides are under trained, and that most of our stories were not compelling. Here are two quotes from the summary report: The group complained of redundancy in the kinds of historic house museums, mostly mansions and their collections. I don't know if I can say this in a church. "Too damn many spinning wheels." As one participant put it, too few examples of 20th-century life-styles. Also within the houses, historical interpretations often seem repetitive, boring and questionable. Their characteristic "period rooms, guided tours and don't touch environments" in one participant's words seemed tired and antiquated, disconnected both from current issues and from their own communities. I don't want you to get too depressed here--participants in the conference lauded historic house museums as “embodying powerful assets of great potential value. They can be emotionally powerful settings that contribute to the stability, pride and sense of place of their communities. They give immediacy to history that you can't get elsewhere. They are unique places that don't change like everything else. They allow people to step back in time, understand the continuity of the communities and feel in touch with something authentic. They all provide rich and diverse learning environments for people of all ages.” So here we are faced with the reality that the public does not seem to be responding or perhaps we're not delivering the things that we have the potential to deliver. One more thing the gathered professionals talked a lot about: unintended consequences of our own professionalism and professional standards. I think we beat this about for the better part of a day and a half, that the National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services, AAM Accreditation Programs have all forced us on the one hand to elevate our standards of collection, care and interpretation. That's a good thing. But they've also encouraged, forced or compelled us to expand our programs beyond our resources. That's a bad thing. They have made us feel guilty if we do not attempt to be all things to all people.
They have unintentionally pushed us all into the same mold, and we could talk about that I'm sure for hours amongst us. One reality that we've noticed at the Trust is that matching grants often draw money and staff away from our operating budgets to support a labor intensive initiative for which there will be no future financial support when the grant money is used up. The result is that we are spread too thin, we've taken our eye off the ball to serve somebody else's agenda. Probably some of you have found that an individual donor can do the same thing, but it's not quite so institutionalized. So I ask these questions. Does every site have to interpret social history and cultural diversity? Does every site have to offer school programs? Does every site need to market to all audiences? Wouldn't it be better in most communities for sites to develop niche markets and focused services; wouldn't the community be better served? In neighborhoods with multiple historic sites, and there are those almost in every urban setting in America, and I'm told there are actually a few of those in Philadelphia. In neighborhoods with multiple historic sites, do they all need to compete for visitors, school programs, special events, weddings, donors and every other thing you can think of? Wouldn't it make sense for a few to concentrate on tours only, a few to concentrate on school programs only, and even a few just to do special events? I think sites need to be very strategic and work much more collaboratively with nearby sites to develop specialized services in markets and to clearly define and market what I would call their compelling difference. Experienced professionals have worked with this declining attendance syndrome as you can tell for several decades, and one result is that we now have a lot of responses that have been tried, and I would say most of these responses have shown they don't work, and I'm going to go through a few of those and you can argue with me about it later over a glass of wine. The first response is we can fix this by increasing the marketing budget which, by the way, most of us find we're unable to do even after we decide that's the right decision. But if you're covering the basics, which is you've got rack cards, you've got a web site, you're listed in whatever the local travel directories are, additional marketing offers very little return, and we know that from grant after grant where people have gotten a one time infusion of $50 or $100,000 to do marketing and they do it and nothing happens. Two, add a new gallery or addition or a visitor center. Except for opening night, almost universally there's no long-term impact from that except that you now have more building to maintain and operate. So from a financial point of view, it usually has a negative impact instead of a positive one. This, by the way, is the preferred solution for almost every big museum. We'll build another wing. Three, add a changing exhibit space. This seems to be the preferred solution for smaller institutions. It does generate some increased visibility because when you do a changing exhibit, the local press will pick it up, but other than opening night, it rarely has any impact on attendance and it takes labor and money to keep changing exhibitions. So it's sort of like the addition in the long run. It may be the right thing to do for educational reasons, but don't think of it as a solution to your financial problems or your attendance problems. Number four, a favorite of historic house museums, starts with this sentence; if we just restore the X room, parlor, dining room, bedroom, whatever, to -- and then insert the word -- the Georgian, Federal, Victorian, early, later period -- with a new furnishing plan, people will come. That also doesn't seem to work. I can't think of one successful case where somebody said we restored the parlor and people just beat down our doors. Now it may again be the right thing to do for preservation reasons, for educational reasons, but to look at it as the savior for your budget is misguided. Maybe just improving the product that we provide is not enough. Maybe we need to reinvent ourselves a little more aggressively for the 21st century. Now I could probably give you ten more sort of standard scenarios for dealing with this, but they all would end with the phrase, so far it has not generated new attendance. So I can't tell you what you should do, but I can tell you a little bit about what we're trying to do at the National Trust, and some of these I think I would be confident enough to say are working and some of them I would say that the jury is still out. But I will tell you that one of the joys of working for the National Trust is that with 28 historic sites, we can afford to take a little risk, and if you're the one and only site that you're working with, I think we all feel we have to be pretty conservative. And our efforts at changing our sites, reinventing our sites start with a couple of general rules though, and the first one is collaborate and combine. Wherever we can, we try to collaborate with institutions nearby rather than do something on our own. You can argue, and it's probably true, that sometimes it's easier to do it yourself than to collaborate, but in the long term for both financial reasons and good neighbor reasons, it's usually better to try collaborating, and in our experience when things work well, collaboration sometimes leads to a long term combination. I think it is inevitable in the next several decades that there will be fewer historic house museums and fewer historic sites, and the question is whether there will be fewer because the organizations have combined and we have what were two or three struggling nearly house museums are now a relatively strong organization with the same two or three museums, or whether they simply no longer function as a house museum and they've been put back into private hands for preservation. And by the way, I don't consider that to be a failure. We have helped a number of historic house museums go the path of privatization because a lot of them got started in the first place with the goal of saving, you know, this house is threatened, we've got to save it. You know, Robert E. Lee's boyhood home. And then when they save it, nobody comes. What happens is the historic house museum becomes the mechanism for saving a building, and it seems to be the public way to raise money to save a building. The original goal wasn't to create a historic house museum, it was to save the place. So if the house museum model doesn't work, you put it back into private hands with preservation easements on it, which you can do, and a private family now owns it. They may be financially better off or better able to take care of it than the organization. That's exactly what happened with the Lee boyhood home in Alexandria. It's now being better preserved than it ever was when it was a historic house museum because the couple that bought it has lots of money. So collaboration and combining is one thing. A second key word for us is focus. It's the opposite of being spread to try to be all things to all people. It's figuring out which of your programs are the really successful programs; what are you real major assets; what is your niche audience; and trying to design a future around that rather than trying to do everything. And I actually have a couple sites that I am encouraging to drop their school programs because they're costing them too much money and we have other sites that are doing school programs, so nobody is going to accuse the Trust of turning their back on kids. But we have a couple sites -- the Rockefeller mansion is not well suited for school kids. We don't do school programs there and never have, but we're doing them at Lyndhurst which is just around the corner and nobody is complaining. So focus is I think a key. Now you're going to think I'm speaking out of two sides of my mouth because the other key word is diversifying. We are -- and by diversify here, we don't necessarily mean programs; we mean diversify your income streams. As we were writing business plans in which we're trying -- our goal -- we're not there anywhere -- but our ideal goal would be that one-third of our revenue would be earned in -- at least one-third would be earned income, one-third would be endowment, and not more than one-third would be contributed money that we have to go out and raise every year. And by the way, we have some sites that believe it or not are too dependent on endowment, so when the market is doing funny things, they're in trouble. Most of our sites don't have enough endowment, which I'm sure is a familiar problem, and we're working to change that. One of our guidelines for our boards is that they should be spending ten percent of their fund-raising time on endowment, long term deferred giving, because that's a need that -- that's not going to fix anything today, but if we're not spending a little bit of time on it today, we'll never get where we need to be ten and 20 years from now. And I've begun to preach that we haven't saved (preserved)anything unless we're financially stable. Every effort we've put into a site is still at risk until that site is financially stable, and obviously that's one way to do it. The fourth thing that we are focusing on is trying to shift the measure of our success. We have been trained to measure our success by counting the number of people that come in. I use that measure to tell you that we're not being well graded by the general public, but we're trying to shift our measure to the quality of what we do rather than the quantity of what we do. So if we can replace a program with a body count with a program with a small body count but where the people go away really enriched by their experience, we're going to consider that a success, and I can give you some examples. We do a program at the Pope-Leighey House which is a little Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian house which draws a reasonable number of visitors now. I think it's over 40,000. But we do a program on Saturday mornings where we close the house to the general public and we invite 12 people who buy the tickets in advance to come in. They can come in; they can sit on the furniture; they can crawl under the beds; they can measure things; they can photograph things. We have three interpreters in there with them. It's up close and personal with Frank Lloyd Wright, and that program is sold out months in advance. We do it one Saturday a month and I think now you'd have to buy a ticket for like six months down the road, and we charge $28 a person. It's a very small audience, but those people go away really enriched by the experience. We do a program at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio which is called Architecture Camp, and high school kids come in and they work a week in Frank Lloyd Wright's studio designing houses. It became so popular and there was such a demand, we now have to do one for their parents every year. So these are not programs that will necessarily pay the bills, but they will elevate the level of what we're doing, and I think in the long-term they will help strengthen our position in the community. And that's the other thing that we do, is we urge all of our sites to connect with the community around them. This is going to come as a great surprise-- A lot of old houses are in old neighborhoods and a lot of old urban neighborhoods are in decline or have been in decline, so one of the tendencies for historic sites is to keep building bigger fences. We've taken an opposite approach. Cliveden is going to be our model. I think for other places, and said so, we need to get engaged with the neighborhood around us, we need to get out into the community, get the community in here. At Cliveden, we decided that instead of focusing the bulk of our energy on 2,200 visitors who come to Philadelphia from some other place, we would focus the bulk of our energy on the neighborhood in which we're located and the community in which we live, not giving up serving the other 2,200, but they wouldn't be our major reason for being. So given those kind of goals or rules, let me give you a few examples of other new directions at the National Trust. We have a number of sites that we say are located in tourism-challenged locations, and they are tourism-challenged for different reasons, so the solution that we've taken at each site is different. Brucemore is a wonderful 19th-century mansion in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; it was the home of the Quaker Oats family. Well, Cedar Rapids is not a tourism mecca. They decided pretty early on that they would define their major audience as the local community. So they do extensive school programs, but they also do a summer Shakespearean festival on the lawn. They do jazz concerts. They do a wide range of cultural programs because they stated that their mission was to enrich the cultural lives of the community. Remember, we're a preservation organization, not a historic house museum organization, so one of the things a site can do is decide to run a historic house museum, but they can also do a lot of things that would be beyond the tradition of a historic house museum that are within our mission, and I think I would encourage a lot of you to think broadly about what you can do with your site that's a little outside of the normal historical house museum or historic site mission. So Brucemore has been quite successful and it is beloved in its community. Everybody in Cedar Rapids goes to Brucemore for one thing or another, and they get all the financial support they need from their community as a result. Oatlands, which is a Southern plantation house that we have in Loudon County, Virginia, which for a decade has been the fastest growing county in the United States, has 300 acres around it. It is a green space in this sea of suburban sprawl. For the last 30 years they tried to become a successful historic house museum in the sense of trying to use that as their major income stream. In the last decade they've shifted. They've realized that the real asset they had, without putting down the historic house, the real asset was the grounds that they had. They've decided that they really like -- they can be like a central park for this sprawling suburban community. So today, they only have 15,000 visitors that come through the house, which is a healthy number but not enough to support them, but between 80 and 100,000 people come to their events every year. They do dog shows, equestrian shows. They do a bridal fair. They do wine tasting. They do antique shows, craft fairs. That place is packed almost every weekend, but again, they now not only balance the budget, but they get a lot more contributed income than they used to because they're serving the community in which they're located, and now they're beginning to take the profit from the events and invest it in the restoration of the house and the furniture in the house. So it's turned out to be a win-win for them. Decatur House, Stephen Decatur, great naval hero, his house was designed by Benjamin Latrobe. It's a great architectural masterpiece. In Washington, nobody really cares. This house is a block from the White House. It has to compete with all the free Smithsonian museums. It's tough being a historic house in Washington and expecting to charge an admission, but they have a great carriage house which they spent a lot of money rehabbing as an event location, and unless they reform the lobbying laws, they'll continue to do quite well because everybody wants to throw a party near the White House. So they generate so much income from the party function, the hospitality function, as they like to call it, and their store which is in a good location as a gift shop, that they decided three years ago to quit charging admission and their attendance has actually gone up. That means they make more money in the gift shop than they did before. So they were making very little on admissions, but by not charging admissions they now make even more on the gift shop. So that may be a Washington solution that doesn't work everywhere, but it works there. I've already mentioned Cliveden. With David’s leadership, Cliveden will jump into community revitalization of the neighborhood. We hope that will be a model for sites all over the country. Instead of a historic site closing itself off from its neighborhood, it could actually be a catalyst for revitalization. Cliveden went that direction because it looked at its resources and the environment, and one of the resources was hey, we're a part of the National Trust. They've got programs like Main Street and community revitalization and couldn't we bring all those to our neighborhood and make a difference. So I think they can and I think they will make a difference. Now, have we given up on the traditional historic house museum at the Trust? I don't think so. At Montpelier, we're spending $22 million to restore the mansion to the way it looked when James Madison lived there, which means we actually have reduced the physical size of the house by two-thirds, took off all the DuPont additions and wings, because we believe that there's a value in the sort of magic that a historic house can give if -- this is the big if -- if there's a powerful story to tell and if it's significant enough. Now we think that as the father of the Constitution, this is a nationally significant story, and we should make every effort to use this site to get the American people to think about the Constitution and what it means. We’ve done this with the presumption that at best, our attendance there will double. (Most of us don't think it will actually double). It's at about 65,000, but the new visitor center that goes with this restoration is being designed for a maximum of 125,000. So we're not thinking that by spending $22 million, people are going to beat down our doors. But we're also not putting all our eggs in one basket. We've also raised $10 million to establish a center for the study of the Constitution, whose function is to train teachers on how to teach about the Constitution. It's a residential week-long teacher training program, and we are using a number of the farmhouses on the property as accommodations. We're now developing classroom space and we're raising the money to endow that program, because that's a program we don't want to chase money every year. The other two places I might mention that are much more in the traditional line in their own way are the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Drayton Hall. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is the one site where the attendance has steadily grown every year up until now, and now they can't handle anymore until they add some capacity. So they're at the maximum number of visitors they can take. Their attendance has grown because of word of mouth, not because of marketing, and that's a lesson that we've also learned. No matter how much you spend on marketing, your best advertisement is word of mouth. And the reason why the word of mouth is so positive is they tell great stories and they tell stories that to the people who hear them are relevant. They are stories about the immigrant experience, and if you go far enough back in any family histories, somebody went through that immigrant experience. But they've also decided that they need to stay relevant. So they've created a Main Street program, they're creating a Main Street program for the neighborhood in which they're located. They're fighting gentrification of the neighborhood because the neighborhood still is a neighborhood of immigrants. The only difference is that it used to be Irish and then Italian and then Jewish immigrants. Now they're Asian immigrants. They use the site to teach English as a second language. They use the site to teach an orientation to America program to immigrants coming in today, and the site is perfect for that. It shows these immigrants that every American went through the same experience that they went through somewhere in their family's history. They publish an immigrant's guide to New York City which lists all kinds of things that immigrants need to know. It’s in four languages and the Tenement House collaborates with the City of New York to produce it. So this site is preservation, it's history, it's also relevant to what's going on in the neighborhood around them.
Now let me mention Drayton Hall. From the beginning, Drayton Hall made two decisions. One, there would be no restoration. It's pure preservation. And two, there would be no furniture. So they never have to worry about drifting off into decorative arts interpretation. They focus a lot of their interpretation on the people who built this place, meaning the slaves. They spend an intensive amount of time doing interpreter training and they get the best visitor grades of any National Trust site. Staff at Drayton Hall tell the story that when a lot of people buy tickets, they're told that there is no furniture in this house. A lot of people say, “I don't think I want to go through if there's no furniture.” So staff say, “If you buy a ticket and you go through and you want your money back at the end, no questions will be asked.” Staff claim that in 22 years, nobody has ever asked for their money back. So Drayton Hall is doing something right, and what they're doing is they're staying focused and they're telling a great story, and people really respond to it. At other sites, we're looking at taking down the velvet ropes, and we're probably going to do some things that will be written up in a negative way in the professional museum press, but we figure somebody has got to step out. We have a new house in San Antonio that's the house of a great collector and a great preservationist. It's got a little bit of everything. One of our programs there is going to be evenings for collectors. Let's say you're a pewter collector, because he's got a pewter collection, a Wedgewood collection, an art collection, a Texas furniture collection. He's got at least 50 different categories of collections. You'll come in, you'll sit in the furniture. We'll get a curator from one of the local art museums to talk about the stuff and we'll pass the pewter around. We haven't decided whether we'll make everybody wear white gloves or not, but the idea is we want people to get up close and personal with this. We think this is an audience that will appreciate this otherwise very cluttered house and the things in it, and we'll break a few sort of museum rules in order to do it, but we think it's probably the right thing to do with this property. We're going to do the same thing with Philip Johnson's Glass House in a slightly different way. The Glass House is a great icon of modern architecture. People forget there's actually nine buildings on that property. We want to use this site for three programs in this order of priority. The first program is to use the site to win friends and donors for the National Trust. So we're going to entertain people there. We're probably going to have very small dinner parties on Philip Johnson's table right in the middle of the historic house, and we think that's okay. We think Philip wanted us to keep using the house as a house. He kept saying don't make this a historic house museum. Second thing we're going to do is we're going to use this as a place to work with all of it. This is a very inspirational place for people in art history, architecture, design, and if you think about its location in New Caanan, Connecticut, there's probably 200 graduate programs in those fields within 100 miles. So we want to have scholars in residence there. We want to have faculty members bring a class out for a day and sit in the house or sit in the gallery, use the site. These will all be what we would call low impact uses, but they're up close and personal uses that take down the velvet ropes, and we're only going to have the public in there seven months out of the year. They’re going to go through not more than nine people at a time because we think that's the maximum you can have with an interpreter and still get some sense of the real space there. We also are going to train our interpreters to do something that I've rarely heard an interpreter do -- be quiet -- because we think that an interpreter there can get a visitor started and then they ought to just be quiet and let the visitors interact with the place. So we're thinking that the historic house museum is not dead. It's simply that we need to rethink all of the lessons that we learned in the last 100 years and think about other ways we could use these. Rather than focus on how many people we can get into these sites, let's think about how we can use the sites. Let’s create a better experience for that smaller number of people. We are trying to look at the declining attendance as a liberating force, and I guess the best example of that would be how many of you have been to Mount Vernon. Well, if you stood in that long line and paraded through the house, you know that although it's an icon and you have to go, you don't really get much of an experience by that visit because there are so many people there. We would rather serve a small audience and give them a real quality program and then our hope, of course, is that in order to do that we have to be less financially dependent on how many people come through. To that end, diversifying our income is a real key. We’re looking at actually building a hotel on one of our properties-I can’t mention the site because it hasn’t been announced yet-but we will do it only if we can have it designed in a way that it's actually a positive addition to the site rather than a detriment to the site. And that we can use it as a model for other places that are engaged in the heritage tourism business as their major income stream. The last site I'm going to mention is Kykuit, and none of us can do this because none of us have the Rockefellers behind us except Kykuit. But Kykuit is a place where we already violate a lot of sort of the standard tenets of our profession. We developed Kykuit as a conference center. The coach barn has been redone, very contemporary interior in it, but it's beautifully done. Everybody who goes to a conference there says it's the best place they’ve ever been for a conference. And one of the reasons is that when you go there for a conference, you get to sleep in the Rockefellers' bedrooms. Although the ground floor and the basement are open to the public, we use the upper two floors as residences for the conference center. To many people, that seems like an incompatible use, but it has worked wonderfully well out there for ten years, and it's encouraged us to think that some of our other properties that have like eight bedrooms may also be used that way. If you're a member of the visiting public, how many bedrooms do you need to see to get the message? Could we use four of those bedrooms for visiting scholars or maybe for a bed and breakfast? I don't know, but we're going to look at all of those kinds of options because I think the world around us has changed and I don't think the solution for us is to try to do more of what we've been doing. I think there’s a need to look at new ways, new ways to use these rich resources that we have. So that's my sermon, and now I'm ready to take questions and comments and criticism. There's a question, a statement.
A question and answer session followed Mr. Vaughan’s remarks.
(Q)I definitely agree with you. Quality not quantity, and I'm from a very small historic site, a very large building on four acres of land, and I'm part of a larger entity, a government entity, and we're currently undergoing a strategic plan to kind of develop the park system and merge the historic sites into that. Our government wants our sites to be self-sufficient in a sense that we're producing the income off the visitors to keep the sites going. I'm glad that you said to us tonight that that isn't going to work because I'm going to go back to my boss and tell him it's not working and it hasn't worked, and this is the kind of ammunition I need not to become a park, because we're not; we're four acres of land. I wish I could have more land and be able to do grand things, but we're not a park. But in a traditional sense, what we've developed on our site is we picked out what we've done best, and that's exhibits that bring people all over from the East Coast, and it's quality not quantity. So thank you for that.
(JV) By the way, one of the figures I'm often asked is what do we spend per visitor. Our number is, depending on which set of figures you use, is between $29 and $32 per visitor. I think the highest admission rate we have is $26 at Kykuit. So we're like the used car salesmen, you know, who loses a little on each deal but makes up for it in volume.
(Q) While you're on that example of the lodging and convention at Kykuit, do you find local institutions are able to partner with any of the sites to use them for overnight stays or boarding and so on? For example, I'm with an architecture firm that looks after some historic buildings in Chester County. It happens to be on a large veterinary school campus that's operated by the University of Pennsylvania, so they use the buildings for visiting professors and graduate students who need lodging for short periods of time. The buildings continue -- the farm buildings which were residences continue in their original use as residences because of this association with the University of Pennsylvania.
(JV) Yes, we have some people living on most of our sites, and in some of those cases we're converting them from staff to either what we're calling housekeeping cottage kind of rentals or we're using them more for academic programs like scholars-in- residence and visiting fellows, and we have a few sites that have partnered with a local hotel so that when they do conferences, they get special rates.
(Q) I wonder if you could maybe talk about some of the broader cultural trends that you see that have led to this sort of gradual decline in the historic house museum. Are there specific books or reports that might be available to look at that address why this trend has taken place and is it really a long-term trend or is it part of sort of a wave and troth cycle?
(JV) I can't site a specific published work, but there have been so many articles. I have a file in my office. People know this is a subject dear to my heart so people send me copies of any depressing news they find about historic sites around the country, and I have a nice thick file. But there are a number of theories out there. I think everybody would agree it’s not one thing. The piece in the New York Times recently talked about the fact that a lot of museums are suffering because of changes in our travel patterns; people used to drive on a family vacation and go from one place to another. After deregulation, air fares became so cheap that they fly. So a lot of sites in the Midwest or in rural areas that used to have traffic going by their door just don't have it anymore. That would not apply to institutions in urban areas. You would think urban sites would benefit from being in a city because aren’t spending time on the road getting there. I think it's fair to assume that a large part of it is just the multiplicity of activities that people have in front of them now that they didn't have 25 or 30 years ago. And we need to recognize that although we are not in the entertainment business, we are in the leisure time business. People have so many other demands and options with their leisure time. So it's not just that there are too many historic house museums. It's that there are too many other things that people can do with their time. As we go through this generational change, the younger generations seem a lot less drawn to history, probably because most schools don't teach it anymore. Now schools teach social studies and that’s part of the cultural changes that is taking place. I think that's why we're seeing positive responses at sites where we've shifted the emphasis away from the sort of narrow history and we're doing jazz concerts and plays and dog shows and all this other stuff. And again, we're able to do all that within our mission because our mission is preservation, not just history.
(Q) Do you know any statistics or have you come across information on whether walking tours of neighborhoods, historic districts focused on architecture or even the history of the area are increasing in popularity, decreasing or anything that you know might point that out as sort of a changing way of experiencing historic buildings?
(JV) I can't quote any statistics. I do know a number of places that have decided that one of the things they should do is get more out in the community, and they're doing more of that, but whether that's overall adding to their total attendance, I think it's a good question and somebody ought to be looking at it.
(Q) I'd certainly agree with you about the teaching of history and also the way it's taught to a certain extent, but I wonder sometimes if maybe people and particularly younger people are getting a little tired of being told that history is relevant and that where we have gotten into the habit of emphasizing how these people were just like you and how relevant it is to today, maybe this is a mistake. Maybe we need, since it is part of the leisure business, to bring back the romance of history in the sense of saying this is a very different experience. You're entering another world; the past is another country; they do things differently there, and have you -- do any of your sites experiment with this? Do you have any thoughts about that?
(JV) I'm not sure I agree that it's one or the other. There are sites that are very much trying to go back to the sort of great person, the more biographical rather than the social history. Mount Vernon, of course, has George Washington super hero now and they're planning with Steven Spielberg doing the video for their orientation film. And they plan holographs for their rooms. But I’m not sure about that idea either way.
