New Orleans World War II museum finds tourism niche

With a day of events planned on Saturday and more than 2,000 guests expected over the weekend, the National World War II Museum 900 miles away in New Orleans simultaneously celebrated its own anniversary.

Opened in 2000 as a D-Day museum, a year before the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, the museum now operates on an $10.8 million annual operating budget and has plans for a $300 million expansion.

It weathered a months-long closing after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, but has emerged in strong financial shape, said its chief operating officer, Stephen Watson.

“We’ve dealt with adversity and handled it well,” he said.

The Bedford memorial, in comparison, is struggling to bridge the gap between a $2.2 million annual budget and the estimated $600,000 in revenue from ticket sales, gift shop sales and tours, its foundation president, William McIntosh, has said.

The New Orleans museum opened June 6, 2000, exactly a year before the Bedford memorial, as a D-Day museum. Historian and author Stephen Ambrose founded it. In 2006, the name was changed and the museum’s mission expanded to encompass all of World War II, museum spokeswoman Clem Goldberger said.

As opposed to the largely outdoor nature of the Bedford memorial, the New Orleans museum is a large glass-faced building. Inside, Goldberger said, are Higgins troop carrier boats, a Sherman tank and an airplane used by U.S. paratroops in the D-Day invasion, among other exhibits. The museum focuses, though, on first-person oral histories from veterans, she said, calling them the “heart and soul” of the museum.

The largest source of revenue for the museum is a direct-mail membership program, Watson said. The program, expected to generate $5 million this year, has about 120,000 members from across the country, he said. According to the museum’s Web site, memberships range in cost from $25 and $500.

Mail America, headquartered in Forest, is one of the museum’s biggest partners in the campaign, he said.

According to the museum’s statement for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, its admission charges brought in about $1.2 million. The gift shop generated close to $640,000, and sponsored events and conferences brought in $1.5 million, among other revenue generators.

An annual fund campaign, which seeks premium memberships of $1,000 to $10,000, is largely solicited by the museum’s 50-member board of trustees, he said. The museum has even opened an international travel program to develop additional income.

After Hurricane Katrina, he said, not many people were coming through the museum’s doors. That forced the administration to lay off workers and diversify revenues.

“In many ways, that prepared us for what happened in the economy in the last nine months,” Watson said. “We had a very drastic situation that happened overnight.”

The museum’s staff of 90 is now larger than pre-Katrina levels, he said. When three expansion attractions open in November, which is the initial part of a larger expansion, the museum will employ the equivalent of 200 workers, he said.

Even with the slump in the national economy, the museum’s membership program is likely to be about the same this year as it was last year. Income from admissions has increased so far this year, too, he said.

That can partly be explained by the New Orleans economy rebounding from Katrina, apart from the national economy, he said.

Another distinction between the museum and the Bedford memorial, he said, is the museum’s location in a city known as a major tourist destination. New Orleans’ big conventions mean private parties and corporate rentals, which generated nearly $700,000 for the fiscal year ending in June 2008.

“Lynchburg isn’t exactly a tourism hot spot. That’s one major difference,” Watson said. “It’s much easier for us to draw people through our doors.”

Watson said he hopes the Bedford memorial’s leadership can find a way to survive, either through the injection of private funding or, if it wishes, being taken over by the National Park Service.

“Our mission is to tell the story of this great conflict so that future generations know the price that was paid for their freedom,” he said.

“I hope they’re successful.”

Although McIntosh has said the memorial could survive with a $32 million endowment, he said recently that he does not think that such an endowment could be developed.

The practical solution, he said, is for the National Park Service to take over the memorial as a companion to the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., and the U.S.S. Arizona in Pearl Harbor.

U.S. Rep. Tom Periello, D-5th District, introduced legislation last week calling for such a move.