In the shadow of New York’s State Capitol, a 188-year-old state museum that once drew over a million visitors each year has become a confounding symbol of government neglect and mismanagement.
Over the past two decades, the state has set aside more than $75 million for gallery improvements, modernized exhibitions and a new storage facility. Yet virtually none of the money has been spent.
A third of the staff has been cut since the early 2000s. The restaurant and gift shop have closed. The operating budget is flat; the acquisitions budget is down to $36,000 a year.
And amid the institution’s fiscal challenges, federal and state officials say the state is investigating allegations that a high-ranking museum official fraudulently pursued excess federal grant money.
“We are the capital of the state, and we’ve had a tired, stagnant and stale state museum for as long as I can remember,” said Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy, whose district includes the museum in downtown Albany.
“We’re two hours north of the cultural capital of the world,” she said. “There is no reason why we should not have a better cultural museum and resource.”
The New York State Museum, billed as the oldest and largest state museum in the country, is not without merit. Many of its online reviews are positive; one visitor who gave the museum four stars commented that it “looks and smells exactly the same” as he remembered from childhood tours.
Admission is free, with a suggested donation of $5 for an individual or $10 for a family. Officials said that roughly half a million people, including many schoolchildren, visited the museum last year, but they could not be certain: The museum’s visitor-counting equipment is out of service and is on the list to be replaced.
State officials said they were committed to “transforming the state museum into a premier national institution,” but noted that their two-year request for “either a consistent general fund appropriation” or an increase in the fees that support the museum had not been met.
“For more than 20 years, the museum has been financially neglected,” said JP O’Hare, a spokesman for the state Education Department, which oversees the museum.
That neglect radiates from the poorly lit lobby to the dingy galleries, where an information booth sits unoccupied and an A train subway car from the 1940s resembles an abandoned set from “The Twilight Zone.” It has been on display for 46 years, its spooky lifelike passengers still waiting for stops they’ll never reach.
The sense of decline was made clear in April when the state’s official seismometer — one of its few present-day exhibitions — failed to register any vibrations during New York’s freak earthquake, the state’s worst in decades. The device was out of service.
Out of public view, national treasures sit on shelves or in warehouses, rarely or never placed on display at the museum. Among them: George Washington’s flintlock pistol, sword and surveying equipment; a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, written in Abraham Lincoln’s own hand; Nelson Rockefeller’s 1967 limousine; and the wedding suits worn by the first gay couple married in New York State.
The museum was ahead of its time when it was founded in 1836 — a decade before the Smithsonian Institution was created — by Gov. William L. Marcy as an institute for studying the region’s natural history.
The opening of its current home in the Empire State Plaza, in 1976, was celebrated during a four-day event that included a performance by Don McLean, whose anthem “American Pie” was released five years earlier.
By the late 1990s, the museum had built partnerships across the state, importing world-class exhibitions from places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. The State Museum became a Smithsonian affiliate in 2000, giving it access to the institution’s millions of artifacts for potential display.
Clifford Siegfried, the museum’s director at the time, said the museum thrived during the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki, who hosted dinners at his executive mansion for museum directors and the banking executives who underwrote their exhibitions.
In 1999, during Mr. Pataki’s tenure, the state pushed a proposal to replace exhibitions that were called worn and outdated even then, in hopes of reversing a sharp decline in attendance.
But plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on upgrades fizzled in the Legislature, and by 2005, much of the 1999 proposal was itself outdated, prompting officials to hire consultants who would guide the state through a newly crafted renovation to be completed by 2011.
The Legislature eventually approved a total of more than $75 million for museum upgrades, mostly for new storage and reimagined galleries. But at some point, the project was “put on hold,” according to state bidding documents. Only a fraction of the money, just under $7 million, has been spent, with all of it going toward consulting and management fees, museum officials said..
The funding includes $60 million for new storage in 2007, about $17 million for renovated galleries in 2008, and $10 million for a children’s science museum addition that Ms. Fahy pushed through the Legislature earlier this year, state figures show. State museum officials say the unused funds can still be used to pay for the improvements.
Other funding sources also dried up. The state museum relied on support from a sister nonprofit called the New York State Museum Institute, which had raised millions of dollars on its behalf since 1985. Mr. Siegfried wanted to expand the organization’s board to raise more money, but as he prepared to do so, he learned that paperwork required to establish the nonprofit institute had never been properly approved.
Education department officials took steps to close the nonprofit a little over a decade ago, leaving the museum without a crucial source of revenue. Around the same time, Mr. Siegfried retired and was replaced by Mark Schaming, then the museum’s director of exhibitions and programs.
The museum’s operating budget of nearly $13.5 million is still substantial, and more than that of many American museums. But it is tied to a statewide fee on mortgage transactions that has not risen in decades, and has failed to keep pace with the rising costs of running a 100,000-square-foot facility.
“This is not a sustainable amount, and cuts have been necessary to stay within the reduced revenue and spending power,” said Mr. O’Hare, the Education Department spokesman. “The current funding does not support the full needs of the museum.”
In 2015, the department unveiled a glossy new “Master Plan” promising a wholly renovated museum that would finally “tell the stories of New York State’s natural, cultural and human history in an integrated, relevant, updated and memorable way.”
Design work was to begin in 2017, construction was to commence two years later and a reopening was set for the fall of 2021, according to a state timeline adopted in late 2016.
Then Covid hit, shuttering the museum for over a year, prompting permanent closure of the gift shop and restaurant and pushing the renovation of 40,000 square feet of gallery space — more than the entire surface area of many museums — even farther into the future.
“To be honest, it’s been an embarrassment,” said Assemblyman John T. McDonald III, whose district includes parts of Albany County. “There’s been a variety of excuses I’ve heard over the years, but at the end of the day, we secured the capital. So it’s time to perform. It’s time to get things done.”
Mr. Schaming, who had spent 38 years at the museum and served as director since 2012, retired this summer after learning that he has multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer that has been tied to the toxins found at ground zero and the Staten Island landfill.
He spent hundreds of hours in both places after the 2001 terrorist attacks, helping to gather artifacts for what is arguably the most moving section of the museum: an exhibition commemorating Sept. 11 and paying tribute to its victims and heroes.
Among other items, the display includes a mangled beam recovered from ground zero, parts of the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the charred but well-preserved fire truck from Engine 6, one of the closest firehouses to the Trade Center. Four of the six-member crew, among the first dispatched to the scene, died trying to save others when the towers collapsed.
Mr. Schaming said he was proud of his work there, from lobbying for gallery upgrades to repatriating Native American artifacts plundered from the graves of New York’s tribal nations. And despite his cancer diagnosis, he said he “doesn’t regret a minute” of his work on the Sept. 11 exhibition.
But his tenure has attracted some criticism and controversy.
In 2023, Brian Slater, who had worked in payroll at the museum for nearly two decades, accused a museum manager of directing him to submit false time sheets to bilk federal funds from the United States Geological Survey. He said later that Mr. Schaming and other high-ranking officials had “supported” the alleged fraud.
In April, Mr. Slater said in an email to lawmakers who represent the state capital region that he had been told repeatedly to follow orders and warned that he “could be terminated at any time for disobedience.”
An investigation by the Education Department’s bureau of labor relations found that the claims were unsubstantiated, and Mr. Schaming said he did not know of or condone any wrongdoing. But the Education Department and U.S. Geological Survey both said that a new state investigation is underway.
Museum officials are planning to conduct a national search for a new museum director; until then, the state’s interim deputy commissioner for cultural education, Michael Mastroianni, will serve as acting director. One thing he, Mr. Schaming and the Albany-area legislators all agree on: They need to begin spending some of the money that was earmarked to revitalize the once proud museum, and the sooner the better.
“We need to get a shovel in the ground,” Mr. Mastroianni said.
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