While it is unclear how modifying the overpass that separates it from downtown will change the museum’s impact on the city, reassessing the city’s built environments to find ways to make traveling it more interesting, safe, comfortable and convenient is certainly worth doing.This museum is definitely hard to get to from the centre of the city. As a former resident of the city, I always viewed it as its crown jewel. Mass MoCA continues to have a net positive impact on North Adams, even if downtown has not benefited as much from it as initially expected. Venturing downtown was the last thing on our minds. After catching up on what I missed - and introducing some old favorites of mine to them for the first time - we were all exhausted. Such was my experience when I visited Mass MoCA a few months ago with my girlfriend and her family after not visiting for more than a year. The museum refreshes a great deal of its galleries over time, so occasional visits often provide distinctly unique experiences with fresh art. However, the main issue remains that Mass MoCA’s greatest draw - that it provides a sprawling, self-contained experience visitors can easily spend hours enjoying, complete with food and drink venues directly on the museum’s campus - doesn’t give much incentive for visitors to venture downtown.īeyond Sheppard’s excellent point on parking, I also think that the museum does a great job of filling your day, especially if you haven’t visited in a while.
#MOCA MUSEUM PARKING DRIVERS#
It is also worth noting that its absence would probably increase congestion, depending on how traffic flows are diverted if it is removed, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it makes it harder for drivers to bypass portions of downtown. Having made that walk several times, it’s not a bad one, though it is true that the overpass does little to enhance the comfortability of the walk. It is unclear how removing the overpass or modifying it will change that simple fact. “That, by the way, right there is the thing that’s very hard for Americans to do, then go under a viaduct and cross a busy street,” he said. Like many other cultural institutions, Mass MoCA was in a fight for its existence, which forced it to lay off a sizable amount of its workforce.ĬOVID aside, Sheppard’s comments in that 2017 article noted something critically important to optimizing foot traffic from Mass MoCA to downtown North Adams: In order to walk from the museum toward downtown, visitors have to walk past their cars in the museum’s parking lot. Unfortunately, three years after Thompson’s projections in Enerson’s CommonWealth piece, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. “In the next few years,” Enerson wrote, Mass MoCA founding director Joseph Thompson estimated that “the museum will far exceed the initial projection of stimulating 600 jobs.”
And even though it fell short on projected jobs, there was great optimism at the time that the museum was on track to outpace it. That’s about two-thirds of the 600 jobs initially projected by the museum founders.”Įnerson references Sheppard’s estimate that Mass MoCA had a total impact of $35 million per year on the local economy. “He says that the museum has stimulated development of 385 jobs to date. “For more than a decade, Sheppard has analyzed the impact of MASS MoCA and other cultural organizations on local economies,” Enerson wrote. Linda Enerson’s 2017 article in CommonWealth Magazine highlighted pretty well the initial promise the museum brought to the city and how it hasn’t met all of its its early projections, citing the likes of Williams College professor and economist Stephen Sheppard:
#MOCA MUSEUM PARKING HOW TO#
The study is the latest in a decades-long conversation on how to maximize Mass MoCA’s economic impact on the town.
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