Getting To Know Your City, Round Two

After closing in November due to lack of visitors and revenue, the D.C. City Museum has vowed to reopen next year. However, museum officials are requesting a yearly $1 million subsidy from the city. "We're on our way," Thornell Page, co-chairman of the Historical Society of Washington, told the D.C. Council on Tuesday. "It's a new vision, new partners and a new future." The museum will experiment with on-site dining, similar to city museums in other large cities. It will continue to rent musuem space out for social functions. Unlike the last go-around, it will not charge an admission fee. "Admissions, in this town, is a deterrent to attendance,'' Page said. "We'd like to get away from that.'' Although initial attendance projections ranged from 100,000 to 450,000 a year, the museum, which opened in May 2003, drew only 36,536 paying visitors in its first 15 months.

Thanks to Peter Buryk