Hellenic Museum starts new building

Institution still needs to raise $5 million for project

06/02/2010 10:00 PM

By MICAH MAIDENBERG
Editor

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A rendering of the new facility, which will be located at 333 S. Halsted.
National Hellenic Museum

The National Hellenic Museum has been an itinerant institution during much of its history, occupying spaces on Franklin Street and then on Michigan Avenue before taking up its current location on the fourth floor of a commercial building at Halsted and Adams in 2004.

That’s expected to change soon.

This spring, the museum broke ground at the southeast corner of Halsted and Van Buren on a stand-alone building that the organization’s leadership hopes will anchor the museum’s future as a cultural and historical asset in Chicago.

Stephanie Anton Vlahakis, the museum’s executive director, described the institution as something of a “hidden jewel in the city” given that its upper-floor space means a lack of street-level visibility. A new, separate building promises to change that, she said.

“Frankly, since we’re hard to see and hard to find right now, it’s going to be a whole different experience when the new museum opens up,” Vlahakis said.

The new building, at 40,000 square feet, will allow the Hellenic Museum to spread out into permanent and rotating exhibition spaces. There will be a reception area and gift store.

Books in Greek and English currently in storage will comprise a new research library. Professional quality temperature controls will allow the museum to take in major traveling exhibits that it cannot host now. And thousands more visitors annually are expected.

Bethany Fleming, a curator who came to the Hellenic Museum last year from new Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Center in Skokie, said the expansion process for a small cultural institution can present growing pains. More is expected of the staff, board and volunteers, she said, to realize goals.

“It’s a constant challenge to reach that opportunity, and keep reaching for the higher goals because you have so much available to you in the new space,” she said.

“This is just modest space for us,” Vlahakis said of the museum’s current facility. “We’re trying to tell a very big story,” she said, from the history of Ancient Greece to the narratives of Greeks who immigrated to Chicago.

Economic conditions, however, continue to challenge many cultural institutions — the Art Institute recently announced a round of layoffs, for example — and a previous idea of folding the new Hellenic Museum into a hotel and condo project a developer had hoped to build died in the housing market downturn.

To date, the museum has raised $10 million out of the $15 million it needs for the project.

Vlahakis said the organization is cultivating major donors to bridge the financing gap in anticipation of opening a retail space and information center next spring on the ground floor of the new building.

“It’s a big challenge right now,” she said of raising the capital. The museum has not used outside financing to secure construction of the building, Vlahakis said, but was considering such a move.

A 2002 agreement with the City of Chicago marked $3.5 million in tax increment dollars from the Near West TIF for the project.

Vlahakis said the museum hopes to have moved into the building by next spring, opening first and information center and retail store.

Contact: mmaidenberg@chicagojournal.com


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