Berkeley Magnes to stay open $100 million S.F. museum cost may get slashed in half
Friday, December 13, 2002 | byABBY COHN
The $100 million price tag for a stalled Jewish museum in San Francisco may need to be cut in half, says the new chairman of the Magnes Museum.
In a candid phone interview, Warren Hellman, a merger expert elected in October to head the board of the troubled organization, also pledged his support for maintaining a permanent institution in the East Bay.
He said he is focusing efforts on opening a museum in downtown Berkeley. But until that happens, Hellman said, he has no plans to close the 40-year-old Judah L. Magnes Museum on Russell Street just west of the Claremont Hotel.
"The bottom line is Berkeley is absolutely not going to be shut down," said Hellman, who landed in a hornet's nest of infighting between museum backers in Berkeley and San Francisco when he joined the board.
Hellman said a faltering campaign means that a $100 million museum project across from San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens must be shelved—and ultimately scaled back to $50 million to $60 million.
"It was on hold anyway," Hellman said of the project that incorporated a striking design by renowned architect Daniel Libeskind.
"They didn't have the money to go ahead."
Created in January with the merger of Jewish museums in both cities, the Magnes Museum has been hit by a sour economy, sputtering fund-raising efforts, staff layoffs, a mass resignation by volunteer docents in Berkeley and scathing criticism over its handling of the East Bay site.
"My message is, 'We've got to become a family,'" said Hellman.
Hellman, the 68-year-old head of a private investment firm in San Francisco and a descendent of the family that once ran Wells Fargo, planned to address his entire museum board for the first time this past Wednesday, as the Bulletin was going to press. He agreed to talk with the Bulletin beforehand because board members would hear his comments before the paper was distributed.
The new chairman said he is working with an unidentified group interested in constructing a multistory building on a museum-owned site on Allston Way near the U.C. Berkeley campus. The idea is to create perhaps 50 housing units above a new museum space—with little cost to the Magnes.
"We put up the land, they build the structure, and we get like 40,000 square feet of a museum," said Hellman, who hopes to seal a deal on the project within three months.
If all goes well, Hellman said, the new museum could open in two to three years. "Then our costs would only be moving in."
Comparing the two future institutions, Hellman predicted that "Allston will be in business for years and years before Yerba Buena will get built."
With the museum fund drive now standing at roughly $15 million to $20 million, Hellman estimated that $50 million to $60 million was a more attainable budget to build, open and endow the San Francisco museum.
He was uncertain what would become of Libeskind's proposal for the old Pacific Gas & Electric Co. substation on Jessie Street.
"I hope we can rework it," said Hellman, who stressed that any talk of redesign was premature.
"We have to get our act together before we're designing buildings for Yerba Buena."
Describing that time as beyond the "near term to intermediate future," Hellman said, "What I hope we can do is maintain the site."
San Francisco "had a campaign that I would say was dubious even when they started on it with the Nasdaq at 5,000, and I would say impossible with the Nasdaq at 1,000," he added.
He said that before launching an official fund-raising campaign for the museum, organizers should have first raised a sizeable sum of money.
"I think they cooked up that campaign without a ton of input from the community," he said. "I think a lot of people were upset [with an approach of] here's the building, here's the $100 million campaign, and now we're coming to you."
Hellman, however, strongly disagreed with museum critics, mostly in the East Bay, who have branded the merger a hostile takeover. Last month's job cuts axed the positions of the Berkeley museum's former executive director, two curators and a receptionist along with four employees in San Francisco.
"I'm obviously totally conscious of how much mistrust there is," he said.
But he called de-merger a "lousy alternative, a lousy option." The East Bay operation, he noted, faced "their own financial distress" before joining with the former Jewish Museum San Francisco.
"In order to accomplish mergers of equals, you tend to make decisions that are difficult to live with," he said. "I think this is an example of that thing."
At one point, he characterized the tangled situation as a "Gordian knot."
"I knew the financial situation was going to be very, very difficult," said Hellman. "I had no idea [about] the depth of the anger."
The animosity splitting the East Bay and San Francisco operations, he said, was threatening not only the future of the merger but also potential donations to the building campaign in both Berkeley and San Francisco. "Usually, wars are north, south," Hellman quipped.
"Things are so rancorous that we're going to scare off people we're talking to," he said. "That's one of the reasons we have to have peace in the family."
Hellman said for the time being, exhibits would alternate between Berkeley's Russell Street site and the Steuart Street offices of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation.
The Berkeley museum, on a tree-lined residential street, is home to one of the country's largest collections of Judaica. But the Allston Way location, purchased in 1997, would be roomier and more visible.
Hellman believes the Russell Street site will ultimately be sold, but "I don't want to do anything about Russell Street until we have clarity on Allston Way."
The museum owes $1.7 million on the existing Allston Way property. "We have approached some of the donors to accelerate some of their pledges," Hellman said.
Hellman remains a "total believer" in plans for a Jewish museum in San Francisco museum. He described the location as a magnet for tourists.
"The Jewish museum started out in an environment where the markets were pretty good," he said. "Then you had a serious market decline."
Part of that economic tailspin resulted in a $2 million shortfall for the museum's fiscal year starting in January. That led to the recent cuts of eight employees in Berkeley and San Francisco—and a flurry of anger, mostly from East Bay museum constituents.
"Layoffs are really sad," Hellman acknowledged. "A lot of these people have been working for the Magnes forever. But we've got to get beyond that."
Hellman said that Connie Wolf, the museum's chief executive officer, had taken a 25 percent pay cut, taking her salary from $200,000 to $150,000 annually.
Asked if he would have done anything differently, Hellman hesitated. "I don't know," he said. "Clearly, mistakes have to have been made or there wouldn't be the acrimony."
Hellman, who estimated he has spent up to 35 hours weekly on museum issues since his election, said as part of his remarks to the board Wednesday he would offer "my resignation, if they like.
"Who needs it?" he said. "If it's impossible for people to get along, I just don't want to do it.
"My bottom line is I really don't have any answers. The only possibility is to muddle through this thing."
And as part of his strategy for doing that, Hellman suggests that "we've got to have two P's: peace and patience."