Concluding its run in a location where it always found itself on shaky financial footing, the Museum of Broadcast Communications earlier this month moved out of its home in a four-story River North building after a commercial development firm exercised its right to buy the remainder of the structure.
Museum officials aren’t saying yet where the museum, which is home to the nation’s only Radio Hall of Fame, is headed. However, the museum’s exhibits have been removed, and its doors are closed in its longtime 62,000-square-foot building at Kinzie and State streets.
The development is the latest in a long series of twists and turns in the history of the museum, which was founded in 1982 and was located first in River City and then in the Chicago Cultural Center. Construction began on the building in 2005.
Financial problems led to a halt in construction, and it finally resumed several years later, with the $27 million building being completed in 2012, in part due to a $6 million jobs grant from the state of Illinois.
The museum occupied just two of the four floors for exhibits, one of which was devoted to the National Radio Hall of Fame, and the other of which focused on TV. Among the museum’s holdings are an original camera used in the 1960 televised debate between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, along with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s wisecracking puppet sidekick, Charlie McCarthy. The museum used the top floor for an events space, and leased the ground level to a restaurant.
Almost immediately upon the museum’s opening, it ran into financial troubles. In 2019, the museum sold its third and fourth floors to real estate firm Fern Hill Co. for $2.09 million and $2.15 million, respectively, and the museum shrank its available exhibition and event space from 25,000 square feet to 12,500. The museum closed in March 2020, reopened briefly but closed again because of poor attendance, and finally reopened in late 2021.
Recently, Fern Hill exercised a provision in its 2019 purchase of the third and fourth floors to buy the rest of the building, said David Plier, the chairman of the museum’s board. The two sides signed a formal sale contract in mid-April, and as part of that purchase of the rest of the building, Fern Hill required the museum to vacate the premises, Plier said. The museum closed to the public April 30, and its officials spent the next week removing all items from its second-floor space.
Nick Anderson, Fern Hill’s founder and president, declined to comment on his company’s plans for the building.
In the meantime, with the museum having vacated the building, where is it headed next?
“That building has always been way more than we needed,” Plier said. “We’re doing something in a new time that’s very interactive. I love Bozo and I love Svengoolie, but we also have to look at a different generation and what they need to see.”
Plier suggested that the museum’s next location could be on a college or university campus. He said he also plans to expand the museum’s board and is coming up with the concept of a junior board that will focus in part on job fairs involving recruitment in the broadcasting industry.
Fern Hill has not yet closed on its purchase of the building’s first and second floors. Plier told the Tribune that the two sides “are progressing” toward the final sale of those floors.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
