Who knew that the City That Never Sleeps had a narcoleptic neighbor?

As I prepare for some upcoming significant changes to my blog, I provide a sort of “placeholder” article as make the final modifications, which I will soon publicize.  The placeholder motif extends to the content of this blog entry, where a window sign serves much the same purpose within its respective storefront.

It’s simply announcing a lunch special.  The restaurant itself?  As indicated at the top of the sign, it’s Bertucci’s, an Italian chain common in the northeastern US.  Though the restaurant’s target market is consistently suburban middle class, it seems as though Bertucci’s restaurants routinely occupy urban settings, in storefronts that directly face the street, rather than a sizable parking lot.  Such is the case with this location.

The sign itself isn’t really remarkable on its own terms.  The only thing that distinguishes it is a condition that these photographs could not begin to capture: the day of the week.  The advertisement for this lunch special is taking place on a Saturday morning, and it’s a good deal: good enough to suggest that this Bertucci’s is struggling to get people in the door on a quintessential weekend day without some real incentive.

Is there something wrong with this Bertucci’s?  Probably not, at least in terms of management and menu—after all, it’s a chain, and if chains lose their consistency for too long, they croak.  So why is this one deserted?  It might have something to do with its surroundings.

The translucent sheen of the contemporary buildings that flank this Bertucci’s comprises one of the busiest commercial centers in Jersey City, New Jersey—just a stone’s throw across the river from New York City.  The Garden State’s second largest city (just behind Newark), it’s also old, settled as a garrisoned Dutch village in the middle of the 17^th century. Yet you’d hardly be able to tell from looking at its coruscating skyscrapers in the Newport neighborhood, seen here in the photos, as well as Exchange Place, directly south of Newport along the waterfront.  It all looks like it could have been built last week.

But the focus for this blog is the larger Newport neighborhood.

Constructed across 600 acres on the old Erie Lackawanna Railway yards, Newport helped galvanize Jersey’s City’s resurgence after its 1986 groundbreaking.  Built as a master-planned, mixed-use community, the intent of its creator, Samuel J. LeFrak of The LeFrak Organization, was to intermingle high-rise residences with office, retail, and entertainment facilities.  The site capitalizes on its pivotal location, adjacent to the Holland Tunnel (with direct vehicular access to Manhattan), as well as I-78 and, not so far away, the New Jersey Turnpike. Newport is also easily accessible by the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, PATH, New Jersey Transit bus routes, and a ferry service across the Hudson River.

In other words, this is prime grade real estate.  And, by most metrics, it has transformed into a successful locus of commerce, while over a dozen apartment towers house the neighborhood’s approximately 15,000 residents.  By the 25^th anniversary of Newport’s establishment, the high density community also boasted a marina, waterfront parks (one with a beach), two hotels, schools,  and the Newport Centre Mall, a regional shopping center whose retail mix ostensibly caters to a broad and diverse socioeconomic base, spread across over 1.1 million square feet and three floors.  This Simon-managed mall also sits squarely within Jersey City’s Urban Enterprise Zone, thereby halving the sales tax rate on goods (only 3.5% instead of 7%) and waiving it altogether for clothing, which no doubt has helped cushion it from the steep decline so many malls across the country have faced.

But for all its amenities, Newport does not seem to have yet mastered the art of fostering a vibrant streetscape.

Sure, there are some people out.  And more people might have been impelled to stroll Washington Boulevard if it weren’t for the blustery conditions on an otherwise mild April morning.  But the fact remains that Newport has metamorphosed into a district with a high concentration of activity in an already active city (Jersey City’s density is well over 15,000 people per square mile, ranking it among the 30 most dense American municipalities).  Nonetheless, this Bertucci’s, sitting right on the neighborhood’s main arterial has to devise special sales to attract visitors to a weekend lunch.  This restaurant’s valiant effort to lure customers only serves to reaffirm what empirical evidence already suggests: that Newport is only lively from 8a to 6pm on Monday for Friday.  Then it hibernates.

The two sons of the late developer Samuel LeFrak strive to continue to his legacy through the family business, but they also hope to improve upon some of the past architectural missteps.  Visual evidence confirms that, aside from the spectacular views of Manhattan from the waterfront, Newport is generally not a terribly desirable setting for people to get out and walk around.  It doesn’t help that ungainly, austere parking garages sit between the occasional storefronts.

Or, for that matter, that one of the primary hotels fronting Washington Boulevard includes a big enough setback to allow for considerable vehicle loading/unloading, as well as some spaces for off street parking.

Obviously, the majority of American hotels—including those in our city centers—include these exact same driver-friendly features.  But the vast majority of American cities cannot boast the sort of multi-modal or mass transit access of Jersey City.  Such a configuration would be virtually unthinkable in Manhattan, and, to this day, even many smaller American cities—often with significantly weaker transit systems—would still include zoning stipulations that vociferously discourage off-street parking lots for hotels within the central business district.

Perhaps, however, the biggest hindrance to Newport ever succeeding as a round-the-clock active urban district is the land use just two blocks away from this photo series.

As Washington Boulevard continues northward of Newport Parkway (the road that rests directly above the Holland Tunnel to Manhattan), the vista changes completely.

Gone are the highrises, replaced by a series of suburban-oriented big box stores (Target, Staples, Best Buy) and replete with off-street parking lots.  The map below shows that this area in Jersey City offers a host of shopping options that one would just as easily expect to see in an automobile-oriented suburb.

Incidentally, this cluster of big box retail sits just south of a huge rail yard, easily visible on the map.  And north of the rail yard is the border for Hoboken, another densely populated waterfront suburb, but one with a vibrant commercial main street, filled with retail and pedestrians at all times of day.

(And, somewhat ironically, Hoboken’s thriving commercial corridor is called Washington Street—a contrast from Jerseys City’s inert Washington Boulevard.)

To be fair, Newport is hardly the alpha and the omega when it comes Jersey City’s retail centers.  The historic downtown to the west of the waterfront consists primarily of two to four-story 19^th century buildings, with numerous street-level storefronts along Grove Street and Newark Avenue.  Many blocks in the older, “real” downtown of Jersey City boast an activity level on par with Hoboken.

If anything, the uninspiring streetscapes of Newport most likely reflect the mindset driving development during the time of the district’s founding.  Back in 1986, when the LeFrak family’s vision first started to take root, much of Jersey City was down on its luck, having left the doldrums of the 1970s in its wake—a time when the city lost a staggering 14% of its population.  At that point, this inner-ring suburb of New York City had been shrinking ever since the Great Depression.  Though a far cry from its 315,000 peak, it has posted an increase in population for the last three decades.  But no one could have anticipated that in the 1980s, when The LeFrak Organization took a chance by purchasing land in a district of dilapidated warehouses amidst a field of creaky, neglected railroads.  At a time when even Manhattan’s future appeared murky, suburban living still seemed like the solution, so it comes as no surprise that the land uses surrounding LeFrak’s bold move still reflect the demands of a mostly suburban clientele.  The mall, the bargain department stores, the wide streets, the visible parking lots—all of these in the 1980s seemed like essential gestures to attract a population seemingly incorrigibly averse to urbanism.

The times are changing, but the remaining boxy Staples and Best Buy, monolithic amidst their generous parking lots, feel more like the final unpainted portions of a canvas, rather than a byproduct of lackadaisical urban design.  By this point, Jersey City’s escalating land values promise a higher and better use in the near future, particularly for a struggling national chain like Staples.  If the chain folds, it’s a matter of time before a savvy builder puts something with a higher Floor-Area Ratio in its place—that is, a taller building that yields a higher rate of return.

In the meantime, until the stronger economy forces developers to strategize on their urban design, Newport will continue to limp along.  It’s still a killer place for an office, and I have no doubt that Bertucci’s can fill its tables during a Thursday lunch.  But this abundance of youthful skyscrapers in an environment that remains steadfastly car-centered looks less like a satellite of New York City and more akin to Dubai.  (Or, at least, everything except the historic center of Dubai, which still remains pretty pedestrian friendly.)  No matter how great the density of jobs and residents, no matter how robust the mass transit, the fundamental character of the buildings and streetscape in Newport does not lend itself well to pedestrianism.  What it does yield, however, is a perfectly extreme application of urban transect modeling, in which the form skips several typological layers, going directly from an urban core zone (in the heart of Newport) to a suburban zone north of Newport Parkway, where the Staples first appears.  But Newport’s atypical renaissance places it at odds with most theories on urban form, even if the results are less than meets the eye.  If the developers make sharper decisions as they continue to invest in the area, maybe sometime they’ll be able to promote a level of energy to the streetscape that will convince people to walk around.  And Bertucci’s won’t have to deploy placeholder signage to make up for the sluggish weekend business.

Who initiated the scrawled controversy? We know (k)nothing.

In a city as replete with illicitly painted buildings as Detroit, it isn’t hard to find graffiti in which the subject matter both polarizes and fully illustrates the ongoing debate between two parties.  In some parts of the country, these polemics rarely stray outside of the stalls of men’s restrooms.  They’re low-key and almost private.  But in Detroit, the debates can take place in the great wide open, on the walls of buildings, lampposts, trashcans, or even the side of a water tower, as I noted a few months ago when I witnessed how one artist transformed the raised fist of solidarity into the heavy metal “sign of the horn”, thereby deflating its potentially incendiary political implications.

But you don’t always have to look at the horizon line for inspiration.

The Addison Building on Woodward Avenue, originally designed by “the architect of Detroit” Albert Kahn around 1905 and restored as market-rate apartments, offers an interesting point-counterpoint at the storefront level.

Scrawled in what appears to be a thick Sharpie is some artless text in all caps:

It says—or at least appears to say—“VOTE NOPE”, which doesn’t convey any precise political directive.  But it’s actually a loosely modified variant of a more common graffiti trope found throughout the Motor City.  Here, on a building at that same intersection as the Addison, is the more common wording.

It clearly says “Vote NCP”.  And the tag shows up all over the place.  Again, the meaning isn’t necessarily clear, unless you know what the acronym NCP stands for.  And most people, it seems, do not.  It was a mystery when I arrived in Detroit last summer; it took some real detective work to draw any conclusions.  The most thoughtful discussion came from a DetroitYES! forum, where a number of participants offered their ideas.  One of the most likely contenders is the New Century Party, a PAC run on the west side, but its hard to reconcile this recent and short-lived organization with the general observation that these scribblings have been around for awhile.  And why wouldn’t a registered political organization choose a more legitimate (and legal) way to promote its cause?

Thus, the word on the information superhighway is that NCP stands for “No Colored People”—about as overtly racist of a statement as one can expect to see, except, of course, that it isn’t particularly overt at all.  Anything less ambiguous would probably attract local media attention, but this branding has never amounted to much of anything, despite the fact that it’s everywhere in downtown and Midtown: buildings, awnings, trashcans, billboards.  The general penmanship is always the same, so a graphologist might be able to determine if it all belongs to the same person: a solitary, cowardly, anonymous provocateur.  I can vouch from experience that, until recently, the tag on the Addison building said “Vote NCP” like all the others. A closer look at the lettering shows how someone else has modified what used to be the letter C into an O, filled the void with a sad face, then added an E to the bottom.

So it appears another vandal has attempted to douse the fire by undermining the implicit racial hostility of the original message.  “VOTE NOPE” conveys apathy at the very least—far more preferable than racism.

But that’s not all: another clown made a separate contribution to this aesthetically challenged palimpsest.  In faint green ink, just above the “N” from “NOPE” is another letter.

It’s a “K”, spelling “KNOPE”, or “VOTE KNOPE” in totality—an obvious hat-tip to Leslie Knope from NBC’s Parks and Recreation, a show whose devoted, cult-like fan base (and this cult’s ability to extract memes from the show’s script and characters) has helped it overcome lackluster Nielsen ratings.  It doesn’t seem that our crusading anti-racist gigglefritzes made it too far though; virtually all of the other “VOTE NCP” tags downtown have retained the vitriol of the original message.

Whether 30 feet tall on a water tower or 18 inches near a storefront window, graffiti’s intrinsic deviant and anti-establishment nature effectively smashes through any constraints imposed by artistic license.  It involves unsanctioned self-expression that doesn’t violate the First Amendment because of the disregard to private property embedded in the expressive act.  Beyond the commission of a property crime, the only true boundaries to graffiti artists are an individual’s creative limitations and the laws of physics.  Because a vandal cannot litigate if someone else defaces his or her art, anything is fair game.  Thus, in terms of intellectual property, the hastily scribbled rants on a public restroom stall are semantically no more or less powerful than a lovingly-conceived fist of solidarity, or a cryptically racist chant that achieves visibility through its ubiquity.  Virtually any provocative message on men’s room walls will eventually elicit an equally inflammatory anonymous response directly below it.  The “VOTE KNOPE” and “sign of the horn” involve the same ethos as the tit-for-tat near the gas station toilet, only the respondents have more time on their hands, a lot more ink, or much less fear of getting caught.  But then, can’t we say the same about even the most widely admired graffiti?

Plowing the factories to plant a field.

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Cities large and small have borne the brunt of criticism from economic development experts for investing heavily in sports venues, in an effort to bring people back—and thus to help revitalize—their old downtowns.  I’ll admit it: I’ve been one of these critics in the past as well, heaping three successive blog articles of scorn to the City of Evansville in its decision to tear down a block of century-old commercial buildings in order to build a new arena.  To be honest, I directed my “scorn”—a pretty overblown word—mostly toward the decision to demolish old commercial buildings, rather than act of relocating an arena downtown in general.  Regardless, I’ve continued to receive comments from naysayers who think that the site of the Evansville arena was perfect, and that my criticism was unfounded.  Maybe I will eat crow someday, but I hold my ground that an indoor arena is hardly a panacea for an ailing downtown, especially when it replaces a structure that is superior from an urban design standpoint.

The City of Toledo offers another target for those venom-tipped arrows—a baseball diamond that precedes its basketball counterpart in Evansville by a good decade.  Though a larger metro than Evansville (at 650,000 to Evansville’s 350,000), Toledo still has a long way to go before it could become an alpha/first-tier city, either in the Midwest or even in Ohio.  And, based on the current trajectory, its not a likely aspiration: in recent decades, Toledo’s population has plunged 25%, while even the suburbs—most of which are comfortably middle class—have remained flat.  But in 2002, the MiLB’s Toledo Mud Hens christened the brand-new Fifth Third Field, a significant relocation from its predecessor, the Ned Skeldon Stadium in the suburb of Maumee.

According to a Toledo Blade article from 2002, quite a few civic leaders perceived Ned Skeldon Stadium as less than ideal, just years after Lucas County Commissioner Skeldon brought the Mud Hens back to Toledo in 1965 after a ten-year absence.  Teaming with a local banker, Skeldon had converted a county racetrack at the fairgrounds to this Lucas County Stadium.  Despite an abundance of parking, an on-site restaurant, several suites, and the MiLB standard provision of at least 10,000 seats, this suburban stadium never drew great crowds.  A Ballpark Digest article recognizes that the stadium suffered from uncomfortable bleachers, numerous seats behind support poles, and the complete incapacity to expand the luxury boxes critical to generating good revenue through corporate rentals.   In 1988, shortly before Skeldon’s death, the City renamed the facility after him in his honor.  And just weeks after filling the dirt over his casket, officials announced their interest in building a new stadium downtown.  Over the next decade, as more of the pieces fell into place, successful ballparks opened in Louisville and Indianapolis, further galvanizing enthusiasm for an equivalent edifice in Toledo.

Fifth Third Field Toledo (not to be confused with the identically named ballpark in Dayton, Ohio) sits snugly within the downtown warehouse district, tucked among sturdy brick midrises from the late 19^th century.  Try as I might to probe the history of the site, I can find no evidence of any controversy to the location that Mayor Carty Finkbeiner and other officials ultimately decided upon for the ballpark.  The only conclusion I can draw is that, like the Evansville Arena, the City eliminated a block of public right-of-way in order to procure the needed contiguous space to build such a large facility.  The Google Map below shows the obvious gap where Superior Street used to continue uninterrupted.

Did the choice to locate in the heart of downtown ruffle any feathers? Did any prominent or historic buildings have to come down?  Or was the surrounding neighborhood so blighted and bereft of investment that few people questioned this decision?

The April 2002 Blade article announcing the Field’s opening only manages to expound upon the mild question of whether the City needed a new structure badly enough to justify over $30 million in expenditures, especially in the face of considerable demand for a new juvenile justice center and Sixth District Court of Appeals.  No hand-wringing over what got demolished to make room for the new venue.  But a partnership between the City and local businesses—coupled with lucrative advance sales of the luxury suites—helped to finance construction.  The result stands as a proud and lively achievement in harnessing energy back to the historic city center, manifested on a sunny Sunday summer afternoon.

While this The Atlantic Cities article speculates that city officials were originally chary to build a stadium without any explicitly dedicated parking, it might have been prudent in the long run.  Visitors to downtown Toledo must either seek garages a few blocks away or on-street parking in the surrounding neighborhood.  Which, apparently, is exactly what they do.

This same article also observes (again, quite speculatively) that the opening of Fifth Third Field represented the first time many Toledans had paid for a parking spot downtown, walking by buildings and storefronts that were slowly enjoying a mild rebirth, as investment began to recentralize through the installation of this new activity hub.  Many of the blocks immediately surrounding the ballpark now offer bars and restaurants.

Fifth Third Field undoubtedly helped breathe life into a downtown that ostensibly had tumbleweeds blowing across main street on weekends in the 1990s.  Nonetheless, few visitors would ever label today’s downtown Toledo “flourishing”.  While a few of the blocks in the immediate vicinity of the stadium are quite lively, any perspective of downtown more than two blocks further portrays an entirely different scenario.

To be fair, I could have framed my pictures so that they deliberately lack people, using that mise en sceneto demonstrate dishonestly that much of downtown Toledo isn’t vibrant.  And, of course, Sunday afternoon is never a fair assessment, because even America’s liveliest cities can appear sleepy on this day of rest.  But notice that most of the buildings in the above photos lack any discernible tenant.  Nothing is animating the structures from the inside, let alone the outside.  The energy simply remains so concentrated in an isolated portion that the resulting impression is that downtown Toledo has a lively little restaurant row right around its baseball field—not that the downtown is lively in itself.

In defense of Mayor Finkbeiner and the ballpark boosters, Fifth Ford Field really did arrive on the downtown Toledo scene with the best of intentions.  If the City had decided to finance a parking garage, not only would the end product cost much more, but it would have further steered motorists into a dedicated space immediately next to the stadium, unnecessarily concentrating human movement to a single facility.  By forcing suburbanites to find their own parking, they have no choice but to toddle around the adjacent streets.  Also, several of the stadium’s walls are completely permeable, meaning that the architects avoided turning the stadium into a fortress.  Notice, for example, this Google Streetview from St. Clair Street.  Passers-by can look right in, giving sensory appeal from the streetscape.

On two of the four corners, the designers maintained corner buildings with retail frontage, or else they decided to add some of their own, manifested by this photo:

Unfortunately, the portion of the stadium fronting Huron Street achieves an effect that is antithetical to good urbanism, as evidenced again by Google Streetview.  Here it does look like a fortress; pedestrians cannot engage with anything visually.  The walk along this block is empty and forlorn, and the buildings across the street show very little evidence of new investment.  Perhaps things are beginning to change since these summer 2011 Google Streetview pics, but obviously Huron Street isn’t picking up steam nearly as quickly as other blocks in Toledo’s Warehouse District, despite the fact that these old buildings are immediately across the street.

Like just about everything in life, Fifth Third Field endures both merits and deficiencies, most of which are intrinsic to stadia and their inevitable programming.  These facilities never offer the sort of day-to-day visitor intrigue that a museum or even a downtown department store might offer.  Their hours of operation are simply too limited.  Arenas and stadiums are moribund when a game isn’t in session.  But a downtown football stadium may be the most fatuous example, since it requires a titanic floorplate, a tremendous cost, and the space only hosts a dozen home games in a given season, at best.   At the very least, the Mud Hens’ 2014 schedule proves something that most of us knew already: that baseball convenes much, much more often than football.  During a given season, Hens get only five or six days off, giving many opportunities to bring suburban Toledans to the downtown on a given afternoon.  From this metric alone, it would appear easy to conclude that ballparks serve as a far better economic development tool than football stadia: they have more impact in a month than an NFL team can offer through an entire season.

But the ballpark only reigns supreme during the sunny summer months.  By early fall, the coach turns back to a pumpkin.  And, during the colder half of the year, an outdoor-oriented venue poses a distinct disadvantage.  Whereas the enclosed Evansville arena can host a variety of events through the dead of winter, Fifth Third Field is unlikely to attract Cirque du Soleil in January…or much of anything else.  The unconventional configuration of a baseball diamond—and its surrounding horseshoe-shaped seating/concession area—becomes a serious liability for most travelling performance companies seeking a venue, even during the summer season.  So it’s a good thing the Mud Hens stay so busy from April to September, because this stadium likely remains pretty empty during a succession of away games, or through the other six months of the year.  Downtown Toledo enjoys a moderately active entertainment district, thanks to Fifth Third Field and the cluster of bars and restaurants that it spawned.  But I suspect many of the nightlife spots seriously cut back on their hours of operation from October to March, unless the city of Toledo has devised a cold-weather counterpart.

Which it has, just two blocks to the north of Fifth Third Field.  No doubt the economic development team responsible for this one-two punch of sports venues thought a hockey arena (Huntington Center) and ballpark (Fifth Third Field) would complement one another.  And maybe that’s exactly what they’ve done.  But sporting events still fall far short of the magnetism that downtown Toledo could boast in 1950, when it survived as the hub of all commercial and retail activity for the metro.  Those days are but a memory, even in cities whose central city economies are surging.  Although the popularity of suburban shopping malls has seriously waned (supplanted by lifestyle centers, category-killing big boxes, or—most potently—online shopping), we have yet to witness a recentralization of downtown retail …at least anywhere near the levels after World War II.

Toledo and its peer cities have sought alternative means of replacing that consumerist energy by bringing America’s great pastime to the city center.  But for all that hubbub, sports venues are rarely the tried-and-true institutions that their champions make them out to be.  Toledans were lukewarm toward Ned Skledon Stadium, probably because at least a few could recall its predecessor, Swayne Field, home to the Mud Hens from 1909 until the club disbanded in 1955.  Demolished a year after the Hens’ departure, its convenient location (closer to downtown than Ned Skeldon but not as close as Fifth Third Field) is now a middling strip mall.  But even Swayne wasn’t Toledo’s first: Armory Park preceded it, at a site currently occupied by the civic center and government campus—and more less downtown.

So, with Fifth Third Field, we’ve come around full circle. How many more years before 1) civic leaders decide another part of town needs rejuvenation or 2) technological advances and shifting customer demand render the facility obsolete?  Will this ballpark last forty years?  Or will it eventually be as old as the surrounding warehouses are today?  I guess the answer depends on whether sports fans are any more or less capricious than shopaholics.  And I’m not willing to hedge my bets.

And on the seventh day...He created a market.

With this article I venture into what may prove one of my most overtly political topics ever, possibly against better judgment.  Yet I wade into these waters as a deliberate challenge to myself, since I strive to separate the intensive political controversy that this tourist attraction elicits from what I think is more interesting and ultimately more cogent: the sustainability of its business model.  Despite being relatively new, this attraction has already lured millions of visitors.  Although tens of millions more have not visited (and have no intention of doing so), the heated debate generated from its opening in the summer of 2007 has inevitably foisted it further in the limelight than its conceivers had ever expected.

I’m referring to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in the outer reaches of suburban Cincinnati, just ten miles west of the Greater Cincinnati Airport (CVG) and also a two-minute drive from the I-275 bridge over the Ohio River that leads to Indiana.  The museum is (at this point in time) the highest-profile project of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a non-profit Christian apologetics ministry that principally advocates for a literal interpretation of Genesis.  Both the museum and its parent organization, now housed at the same address at the museum’s campus, owe a great deal of their size and influence to the tireless efforts of Ken Ham, who first founded a creationist organization in his native Australia in the late 1970s.  After several acquisitions and reorganizations that eventually whisked Ham across the Pacific to an American agency, Answers in Genesis was born, bringing together a smattering of creationist enterprises from the US, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand under one umbrella, all under Ham’s directorship.  In the intervening years, Ham has achieved national recognition for his tireless fundraising, which culminated in the $27 million of private funds to build the 70,000 square-foot Creation Museum—a goal of AiG since its inception.

Even among other Biblical creationists, the Creation Museum has aroused controversy.  It largely serves as the visitor-friendly, public relations arm of Answers in Genesis, which in turn concords with Ken Ham’s theological views.  Ham is a Young Earth Creationist (YEC), meaning that he believes that God created the earth according to the account in Genesis, approximately 6,000 years ago.  Not only does this defy fundamentals to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, it also boldly contradicts most geological or cosmogonal studies of the age of the earth and the origin of the universe.  Thus, when compared with competing perspectives such as Old Earth or progressive creationism, whose proponents have also publicly debated Ham and AiG, the Creation Museum is probably the most at odds with contemporary scientific inquiry.

AiG’s creative team could have tried to accommodate other creationist views to expand its audience base, but they wisely decided it wouldn’t be necessary: Young Earth Creationism aligns with the views of a sizable portion of American Evangelical and conservative Christians.  According to a 2012 Gallup Poll, 46% of Americans surveyed believe that God created humans within the last 10,000 years—a percentage essentially unchanged since the polls began 30 years prior.  Thus, the Creation Museum did not need to cast a wide net in order to find its demographic base.  Initial speculation was that the Museum would see 250,000 visitors in its first year, but it ended up achieving that number within five months.  Almost immediately, AiG began planning to double the size of the parking lot, along with a retention pond to capture stormwater runoff, preventing it from flooding or polluting a nearby creek.  By the end of that first year, the Creation Museum welcomed over 400,000 visitors.

The photos featured throughout this article are no longer all that current; they’re from the summer of 2009, when the museum was about two years old.  The Creation Museum seems to be operating on a trajectory that involves steadily expanding its programming and amenities, though it already seemed extensive during my visit.  A few paragraphs back, I consciously used the word “campus” to describe the site, and while the word may be an overstatement, the museum is more than an isolated building.  The park-like grounds are extensive.

Aside from the outdoor seating, the museum’s property features an huge garden, a rope bridge, and a petting zoo.

Though I’m hardly well-versed in landscape architecture, it was obvious that AiG had invested considerably in both the design and the regular maintenance of these grounds.  The results were, at the very least, pleasing to my own two peepers, but I have no idea if Ken Ham and his team intended for these grounds to feature plant species indigenous to northern Kentucky, or an approximate recreation of prelapsarian Eden, or something else.  There was no way I could know.  The entire garden lacked any signage referring to plant species, Biblical relevance, or anything that would explain context or rationale.  It ostensibly existed simply as a treat for the senses, adding to the attraction for a museum that, thanks to the combination of the exhibits and the outdoor amenities, could easily consume an entire day for visitors.  Since the museum sits in the middle of former farmland, with no other commercial presence nearby, it needed something for its patrons to eat during their visit.  And, characteristic of the largest children’s museums, it offers an entire food court.

Since my 2009 visit, Answers in Genesis has added 20 zip lines and a network of 10 sky bridges to the museum, making it the biggest course in the Midwest. http://www.wcpo.com/news/zip-lining-among-new-attractions-at-the-creation-museum

Inside the museum, the curators have added a new section on dragons, based on the supposition that the Bible’s reference to “behemoths” might not just be describing the museum’s much-celebrated dinosaurs but also other mythical creatures that could have existed before the flood.  But these newest features only further beg the question: what do dragons and dinosaurs (not to mention zip lines) have to do with the story of creation, or anything explicitly referenced in the Bible, for that matter?  These inclusion are entirely within AiG’s right, but its hard to see them as corresponding with the organization’s ultimate ministry.  If visitors pay for the museum’s outdoor element and spend all day on zip lines, how are they having anything but a secular experience?  Instead, the attractions outside of the museum’s walls are ostensibly new goodies to enhance the museum’s ambition as a day-long (or even multi-day) destination in an of itself, rather than a museum that amuses the kiddos for 2 or 3 hours.  Ken Ham smartly located the Creation Museum sufficiently close to several important metros: besides Cincinnati, we have Lexington, Louisville, Dayton, Columbus, and Indianapolis within a two-hour drive.  But when I visited, the license plates often came from much greater distances than the tri-state region.

It would seem that the Creation Museum has succeeded overwhelmingly in its aspirations; after all, by April 2010 it was celebrating its millionth visitor.  But a closer scrutiny at those numbers suggests that all is not well.  After all, if it attracted over 400,000 after one year in operation, which equates to May of 2008, shouldn’t it have reached the one million point at some point in late 2009 if those numbers continued to surge?  The fact is, after a booming year one, the attendance has dropped in each subsequent year. http://citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-26546-creation_museum_atte.html The year ending June 2012 reported attendance at 254,000—barely over the original expectations.  The museum blames the persistently weak economy, which surely does have something to do with it—except that the museum opened just months before the Great Recession, and its most successful first year transpired while we were watching Lehman Brothers and Countrywide Financial collapse.  And AiG’s response to sagging sales was to raise the ticket price in July of 2012: from an already steep $24.95 per person up to $29.95.  It seems like some of those new attractions may reflect AiG’s realization that the Creation Museum is in serious trouble if it keeps moving along this path.  It’s declining faster than a Mainline church.

The response?  Answers in Genesis boldly announced its latest project: a $73-million replica of Noah’s greatest achievement, in the Ark Encounter, under construction about 40 miles away from the Creation Museum in Grant County, Kentucky.  In addition to the ark, it will apparently feature a replica of the Tower of Babel, the life of Abraham, the plagues of Egypt, and the birth of the nation of Israel—all as part of a seven to eleven-minute ride.  But it’s facing a few snags: the project is years behind schedule and has only raised about one-fifth of its budget, and the delays are pushing the estimated total budget up to $150 million—almost six times the cost of the Creation Museum.  The situation is so dire that the neighboring City of Williamstown has issued $62 million in bonds in an attempt to salvage the initiative.  Fortunately the city won’t have to repay these bonds back, since anticipated revenues for Ark Encounter will do the trick.  But these bonds aren’t rated, making them little more than junk.  Among the risks to investors: sicknesses transmitted among the ark’s many animal pairs; lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of a religious project receiving tax breaks; those persistently declining attendance figures at the Creation Museum.

None of the aforementioned news featurettes fully underline why the Creation Museum and perhaps Answers in Genesis are possibly in such serious trouble.  The ministry’s current struggles ultimately foreshadow a cultural misalignment.  When news of the Ark Encounter made its way to some of the Evangelical Christian newsmedia outlets, it understandably elicited reaction, both favorable as well as a fair share of atheist catcalls.  One quote caught my attention: an anonymous commenter who I have no way of finding or reaching; otherwise I would give credit.  I simply copied and pasted the comment.  Here it is:

“What I find so amusing about this whole project is that... Christians don't seem to realize that by giving their Bible stories a Disney like experience... they are essentially highlighting the very mythological basis of their faith. In my opinion for most Christians the [Old Testament] is an out of sight out of mind type thing (because Christians don't actually read the bible) so by bringing focus to these stories in a modern scientific context... only the extremely delusional are going to find the encounter "spiritual" everyone else will gauge the experience by the entertainment value for the dollar...the same as visiting any other cartoon based amusement park.”

Obviously this quote isn’t lacking in condescension toward Christians in general and creationism in particular.  I don’t condone it one bit, nor does it reflect my own sentiments.  I would experience no Schadenfreude if Answers in Genesis were to go bankrupt; it’s obvious the Creation Museum had quite an impact on the tourist economy of northern Kentucky, and it has generated hundreds of jobs for the region.  It would be callous to wish all of this to fail, no matter how dubious the museum’s attempt to reconcile contemporary scientific inquiry with the first book of the Old Testament.  For all the criticism lobbed at the Creation Museum for branding itself as science/history, it suffers no shortcomings as a religious museum, and my philosophy is overwhelmingly laissez-faire when it comes to addressing what matters of faith parents wish to impart on their children—in contrast with what our tax-supported public schools teach.

That said, the comment above nails it in the in the final sentence or two.  Answers in Genesis may have sealed its own demise by embarking on this basic undertaking.  The more goodies it crams into the overall experience and the more it blurs sacred and profane, the more obvious it become that the business model echoes that of Disneyland, regardless of the original intentions.  And if it becomes just another amusement park, even in the eyes of its most ardent Evangelical Christian supporters, it’s not going to be able to sustain itself, because the museum really will end up competing with places like Disneyland (or King’s Island in the Cincinnati area).  Meanwhile, since it does give “their Bible stories a Disney-like experience”, it will make new believers out of exactly nobody.

The other major aspect of the Creation Museum that I think hints at its questionable long-term viability is a simple display sign that, at the time of my visit, was poised strategically near the exit.

Okay, so the kids love those dinosaurs, and you can never go wrong with letting people pet the animals on display.  But is that enough for people to come back—let alone multiple times in a single year?  It would be interesting to know how many annual passes the museum sold even in its wildly successful first year, and, for that matter, how many families actually used those passes.  Color me cynical, but my suspicion is that low sales on the annual pass should have offered the early warning sign.

Over its six years in operation, the Creation Museum has expanded its programming.  But it has never reported any change to its exhibits—a huge contrast with most children’s museums (which are typically heavily science-themed) or most amusement parks.  These attractions recognize that exhibits must come and go all the time in order to keep the overall experience fresh.  Sometimes children’s museums will simply update their exhibits to reflect breakthroughs in scientific discovery.  But the Creation Museum is based on the unchanging Word of God.  It cannot evolve; pardon the pun.  Thus, what incentive do parents have to go back and see it all over again, especially when the museum is trying so hard to serve as a destination for families coming from hundreds of miles away?

When Answers in Genesis opens its Ark Encounter (if it opens), the whole enterprise very likely will benefit from a surge in attendance.  But how long before the Ark Encounter replaces the Creation Museum as the premier Biblical attraction of Northern Kentucky?  Can AiG sustain both, especially with those prices?  And what adult or child is seriously going to want to return within the year, just to experience the exact same spectacle all over again?  All of this ministry’s herculean efforts—and colossal spending—may just become the next incarnation of Heritage USA, the largely forgotten South Carolina Christian theme park that exploded in popularity in the early 1980s, then crashed almost as quickly after America learned of the peccadilloes of its founder, Jim Bakker.  I would never want to analogize Ken Ham to a convicted felon.  But barring a tremendous shift in American culture that has little to do with growing percentage claiming “religion: none”, the quixotic Australian’s empire may prove even more short-lived.