Westchester Children’s Museum Takes Wait-and-See Approach as Playland RFP Process Continues

As the county sifts through 11 proposals in for Playland, one aspect of proposed development at the historic site remains in limbo.

The Westchester Children’s Museum is currently awaiting a decision on a proposed $1 a year, 10-year lease at Playland’s Historic Bathhouses. If approved, construction of the museum could begin sometime this year and the museum could open as soon as 2012, according to its executive director, Tracy Kay.

“If everything fell into place, we’re saying that really it’s an 18-month process from lease signing approval,” he said about the museum’s completion.

In nearly a decade since women from the Junior League first conceived the idea and began a campaign to build a children’s museum, bureaucratic hurdles, a change in county leadership and a recent focus on the future of Playland have all had some impact on the length of the process.

Though both the museum’s organizers and certain county officials say that the children’s museum could exist independently of Playland, whatever happens at the historic park will undoubtedly affect when and if the museum is built and the amount of visitors it will attract.

There also is a slim chance that something else could be built at the bathhouses because the county’s RFP leaves the door open for alternative uses of the site. However, because the bathhouses have historic significance and are part of public parkland, those uses would have to be approved by the state through an alienation process.

For the museum’s organizers, that caveat gives them a certain degree of assurance that they can move forward with their plan. In 2010, the state gave the county approval to enter into a lease with the museum. The county sought the approval after a review process determined that a museum would a suitable use for the bathhouses, which had begun to deteriorate and would have cost the county $13 million to tear down.

Instead, the county will spend nearly $7 million on structural improvements to restore the exterior of the bathhouses. In exchange, the county challenged the Campaign for the Westchester Children’s Museum to raise $7 million to fund its efforts. If the museum's lease is approved, the group will spend about $5 million just to make the building habitable, Kay said.

Museum’s Public Purpose

Some critics have argued that at $1 a year, the county would not be getting the best market value for leasing the bathhouses to the museum. However, Kay said the museum would be making a significant investment in maintaining a public building, so any notions of a sweetheart deal are inaccurate. 

“When you look at a 10-year lease and you’re investing $5 million—it’s like $500,000 a year,” Kay said. “The idea that anyone coming in to make an investment at that level—that after the term of our lease we might have to walk away from—I don’t want to say it’s a gift, but it is a gift to the taxpayers to improve a public building that’s being used for a public purpose.”

Corinne Zola, president of the Westchester Children’s Museum, echoed that point.

“We’re not looking for taxpayer funding to build the museum,” she said. “We’re just looking for a lease, and in fact we are investing [money] back into the county.” 

Though state approval allows the museum to lease space at both the North and South Bathhouses, it is currently only seeking a lease for the 22,000 square foot North Bathhouse. If the museum decides to expand in the future, it could then also lease space in the adjacent building.

Kay said his group already has raised $8 million, more than half of its $14 million fundraising goal.

The campaign will need to raise $14 million to complete construction at the North Bathhouse only. The museum will feature an 85-seat performance center, a host of exhibits and programming for children up to the age of 10, and an indoor play structure called a Luckey Climber, created by well-known architect Tom Luckey, who has designed similar structures for several museums across the country. 

The museum’s yearly operational costs would be between $1.5 and $2 million a year, Kay said. It would charge between $9-10 for admission and would service 200,000 visitors a year throughout Westchester and parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, Long Island and Rockland County. Currently, the closest children’s museums in the immediate area are the Mid-Hudson Museum in Poughkeepsie and those in Norwalk, Brooklyn and Long Island.

Rejuvenating Playland

If built, the Westchester Children’s Museum likely would occupy the most attractive location of all those facilities because of its proximity to the pier, Playland Boardwalk and Long Island Sound. The museum’s organizers said the facility would be the perfect complement to the park.

“We always viewed this as one way to rejuvenate that Playland campus—the whole park, boardwalk and amusement park,” Zola said. “You can have a children’s museum as your anchor. The impact of that on the surrounding environment is just elevated.”

County Legislator Judy Myers said she is confident the museum’s lease will be approved and that it will be successful regardless of whether Playland continues to exist in its current form.

“I see the Children’s Museum as a stand alone, she said. “[But] I love the idea of it being sort of a bookend for Playland. It’s a really great addition to the park.”

She said a draft lease for the museum is moving through the County Legislature and is currently being discussed in the parks committee.

“I would expect it would move out of committee and will go before the budget and appropriations committee.” 

Myers said the museum’s lease could be up for a public hearing at the end of April or the beginning of May. Restoration of the bathhouses could be completed around the same time.

She said the only objections she’s heard to building the museum at Playland involve arguments that call for the county to let market forces prevail and lease the building to whomever can bring in the most money.

With a donor base of more than 2,000 people throughout the county, including 350 Rye families who have donated more than $1 million total, the museum enjoys almost widespread support among those whom it would service. However, County Executive Rob Astorino—who came into office after the museum’s organizers joined into a public–private partnership of sorts with then-County Executive Andy Spano to build the museum—has not publicly stated his position on the proposal.

Peter Tartaglia, a spokesperson for the county’s park department, said the review process for the Playland RFP is currently the county’s priority. 

“We really can’t move forward on the museum until that process is complete,” he said.

The county has not released information on the proposals it has received for Playland. Its legal team is currently redacting information from the proposals before turning them over to a review committee, which will make recommendations for a county report to be completed this summer that will evaluate the feasibility of the RFPs.

Tartaglia said the county does not yet know whether any of the proposals could be adopted for Playland, so it’s difficult to determine what impact the RFPs would have on the park or the museum’s lease.

However, he said “everything has to be considered” in regards to development at Playland and the bathhouses.

At least one respondent to the county’s RFP sees the museum as suitable for Playland. The Rye non-profit group Sustainable Playland (SPI) has included the children’s museum in its RFP and is proposing an arts and educational museum in the South Bathhouse. If its RFP is approved, the group has said it envisions a public-private partnership similar to Central Park as a model for Playland. The children’s museum fits into the group’s desire to maintain the park for public use.

“The amusement park and the Westchester Children’s Museum share a synergistic relationship,” SPI board member Sandhya Subbarao told Patch.

The Rye City Council also has expressed its support for the museum. Though Councilman Joe Sack said the City Council should be open to other proposed uses of the bathhouses, earlier this month the rest of his colleagues voted in favor ofsupporting the museum in a resolution the city submitted to the county that outlined its vision for future development at Playland.

The museum’s organizers contend that Rye and the entire county would benefit from the museum because it will serve and entertain the public, while also having a positive economic impact throughout the entire area.

“Outside of the fact that it is an educational and cultural institution providing that service to the community, there is an economic benefit. If you look at children’s museums, a lot of them have been anchors in redevelopment,” Kay said, citing Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware as examples.

“With our budget and indirect spending, we’ll probably be generating $4 million to the local economy,” he said.

Kay said the museum also would help to make Playland, which is currently open from May-September, more of a year-round destination. If the county decides to keep the amusement park, the museum also would benefit because families coming there may decide to visit the museum while they are at Playland.

“The number we’re using is very conservative,” Kay said in reference to the museum’s projected 200,000 visitors. “Even if we got another 10 percent of what Playland gets, it would be another 50,000 people coming to the museum.”

If the museum’s lease is approved, Kay said he is hopeful the museum will be thriving after a decade, even if it does not have the benefit of Playland’s amusement park.

“The business plan was developed in the worst case scenario,” he said. “If Playland wasn’t to be Playland, could we still exist? The answer is yes.”

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