Home of Marin history broke, but dream still has currency
The Boyd Gate House is a little jewel of Victorian architecture only a couple of blocks off the main street of San Rafael. It has a big front porch, handsome roof gables and a brick chimney, the very picture of genteel country life from Marin County’s quiet past. For years, the house has been the home of the Marin History Museum.
So it was a shock when neighbors out for a walk the other morning saw trucks pulling up outside the 136-year-old mansion, and workers moving in and out of the museum, throwing all kinds of stuff, including display cases and boxes of books, into a debris box. It looked to the neighbors that the hired crew was throwing history into a Dumpster.
That incident is part of a dispute that has rocked Marin’s historical community. It turns out that the Marin History Museum has gotten itself into such a financial pickle that it is closing down after 80 years. Worse yet, the museum’s board of directors has sold some of the collection’s artifacts and are offering more for sale through a Sacramento estate liquidation company.
“It’s sad,” said Laura Ackley, a historian and author who just completed a book on the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. “It’s heartbreaking,” said Michelle Kaufman, who spent eight years as the museum’s collections manager and director. Save Marin’s History, a new group that wants to replace the museum’s current board and revive the institution, calls what has happened an “outrage.”
A cautionary tale
It is a long and ultimately sad story — and perhaps a cautionary tale — of how a well-respected community organization came to grief because it dreamed an impossible dream. It is also a story of management problems, and the effects of the Great Recession.
Marin has a long and colorful history. A lot of what made California famous happened in Marin. The cast includes everybody from Sir Francis Drake to the Grateful Dead.
Eventually, the Marin History Museum had a collection of 200,000 photos and 20,000 artifacts, way too much to house in the pretty little Boyd Gatehouse, which was its headquarters.
So in the 1990s, the museum decided to build a grand archive and exhibit space in Boyd Park, next to the Boyd Gatehouse. By 2004, the organization had raised $8 million in cash and pledges. That’s a lot of money. But the project had problems: traffic issues, parking issues, sewer issues, water issues. “It just kept getting more complicated,’’ said Richard Torney, who was on the board then.
So that idea was shelved in favor of a new idea to attract a younger audience. Marin was the home of music royalty: Journey, Metallica, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Jefferson Starship, Huey Lewis, Bonnie Raitt, Otis Redding, rock impresario Bill Graham.
The new focus was a music museum called Marin Rocks, in a space in downtown San Rafael. It would cost about $7.2 million. “It was ready to burst into reality like heavy metal thunder,” according to a story in The Chronicle.
By September 2009, the museum had raised more than $2 million, including $250,000 from a benefit concert by Metallica.
But it wasn’t enough. The Marin History Museum’s official version is that the recession of 2008 hit nonprofits badly, and “donor behavior changed across the economy ... the Marin Rocks pledges were never fulfilled,” the museum said.
Kaufman, who was collections manager then, recalled what happened: “The board shut down the project, and the exec- utive director, a staff of 11 and 38 consultants were let go.”
A year later, the board gave it another go, but that failed, too. “That put the institution in jeopardy,” Kaufman said. “They raised a lot of money, put in a lot of time, and had nothing to show for it. The community lost faith in the board.”
Moved twice, closed
Things went badly after that: The museum moved briefly to a satellite location in Novato, then back to San Rafael. It then, in effect, closed down.
“The Marin History Museum has been out of funds, with only enough to barely survive,’’ board President Jean Zerrudo said in a statement. She said the board had voted to terminate operations as of Aug. 31.
But that is not the end. Save Marin’s History wants to step in and take over the museum. Ackley, Kaufman and Torney are involved along with several others and an anonymous donor. They want to replace the current board and bring new life to the museum. “We have some donors who are ready to go,” Kaufman said. “We know the community, We know how to turn things around.’’
So far, the old board hasn’t responded. The last chapter of Marin history has not yet been written.