MBC permanently closes River North museum
Pandemic, changing lifestyles took toll
After delays, taxpayer funding, and a much ballyhooed opening, it’s curtains for the Museum of Broadcasting Communications’ River North museum, which closed for good April 30 as reported Tuesday morning by the Chicago Tribune. The museum had historic artifacts from Chicago’s television and radio past, and included the Radio Hall Of Fame exhibit.
Open since June 2012, MBC has had trouble financially operating the facility and according to now-retired media columnist Robert Feder, was looking to sell the top two floors of the four-story building to a real estate firm – and they did to Fern Hill in 2019 with an option to buy the rest of the building – one Fern Hill exercised last month.
Founded some 40 years ago by Bruce DuMont, the MBC had been looking for a permanent home for years, first based in a River City condo complex in 1987 and then at the Chicago Cultural Center, before temporarily closing at the end of 2003. MBC secured public funding of $6 million from the state of Illinois for a brand new building erected at the southwest corner of Kinzie and State slated to open in 2006. But delays in the execution of funding abruptly halted the project, leaving a half-finished eyesore of a building (full disclosure here, the person writing this worked across the street from MBC for eight years.)
After a wait of several years, the MBC building was finally completed and opened after public funding came through. After more than 200,000 visitors came through the doors, attendance plunged after MBC started charging for admission according to a Chicago Reader report from 2015. Crain’s reported the museum pushed off its debt to 2018 – a year before half the building was sold.
There was controversy surrounding the museum, from a donation Comcast made months before it opened to the way DuMont was running MBC – not to mention turmoil in the organization after he retired in 2017. Once available at the Cultural Center, the video and audio archives they amassed moved to an online portal, which was very hard to find and use (from personal experience) at a time when similar clips could be found on YouTube and on the Fuzzy Memories website.
Nevertheless, the building hosted some terrific exhibits including for Saturday Night Live, not to mention hosting a public memorial service for Soul Train creator Don Cornelius and a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan event. But the museum paled in comparison to similar, better-funded – and better-run venues by The Paley Center For Media in New York and the UCLA Film & Television Archive in Los Angeles.
After the third and fourth floors was sold, the museum’s space was shrunk by half. Then the museum closed at the dawn of the Covid pandemic in March 2020, but reopened briefly only to close again due to low attendance and did open again in October 2021. But the issues of violent crime in the area have increased since then, keeping attendance down. Just this weekend, three people were shot a block down the street and last year, another person waived a gun at a TV camera during a live shot nearby.
As for a future location, MBC is keeping mum – one proposal they may be looking at is setting up at college campuses or at a university – perhaps Columbia College. “That building has always been way more than we needed,” MBC board member and WGN Radio host Dave Piler told the Tribune. “We’re doing something in a new time that’s very interactive. I love Bozo and I love Svengoolie, but we also have to look at a different generation and what they need to see.” This could be hard to do, since TV nostalgia from that era is mainly aimed at older people and local TV and radio since the 1990s hasn’t had the same kind of effect on the younger generation as it did for Baby Boomers and the upper echelons of Gen X. MBC recently held an online auction to raise money for whatever they’re going to do next, with a lot of stuff to bid on from the awesome (station tours and a chance to sit in on a few radio shows) to the absurd (Bill O’Reilly.)
As for the building being more than it was needed…maybe this should have said twenty years ago when this entire pet project of Bruce DuMont’s came to fruition. It comes $6 million of taxpayers’ money too late.
It wasn’t Dumont’s choice to retire – as Chicagoland Radio & Media reported:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161231184804/http://chicagoradioandmedia.com/news/8339-news-notes-harpo-studios-wkqx-moody-radio-steve-bertrand-kevin-matthews-steve-cochran-stephanie-miller-more
https://web.archive.org/web/20161231184859/http://chicagoradioandmedia.com/news/8410-museum-of-broadcast-communications-seeking-to-replace-bruce-dumont
Child porn makes people uncomfortable – and rightfully so in a museum with lots of exhibits on Chicago TV shows for kids! Plus Dumont treated everyone poorly unless they were willing to give him money. And even then it’s not like he wanted to listen to any donor’s ideas.
We’ll never know how much the MBC paid – or agreed to pay – the company behind the SNL exhibit but it says everything that the MBC was looking to sell half the building just 6 months after the exhibit opened.
Really don’t think it matters whether he retired or not. I remember reading this article in 2016, but I never really trusted this pub when it was around. Who was his sources on the story? The reason why I did not write about this because I don’t want to get sued if it turned out not to be true as I have no money, and plus I’m not in the gossip business.
I understand – but just because a source is anonymous does not mean they are lying. A lot of people in local media read Chicagoland Radio & Media because Larz didn’t pull punches. He also called it as he saw it when it came to traditionally ‘ethical’ reporters like Robert Feder.
Dumont seemed to be an anonymous source for Feder. Maybe they had an agreement that Feder would never go after him. Heres a tweet from 2010 ( from a account no longer active that belonged to ‘MrsPete’ – https://x.com/mrspete/status/22318821404)….
so Bruce Dumont’s livein boyfriend (& columbia prof) pleads guilty to 2 of 3 charges of child porn and there’s NOTHING in chicago papers?
Guess who Larz was referring to in this sentence – from https://web.archive.org/web/20161231184859/http://chicagoradioandmedia.com/news/8410-museum-of-broadcast-communications-seeking-to-replace-bruce-dumont – from 2016?
DuMont never publicly commented on the situation, refusing all interview requests. He also asked a major newspaper media reporter that he was friendly with to not mention the incident. This reporter, known for some questionable ethics, has continually agreed to DuMont’s request.
And here’s a part of a letter to The Chicago Reader in 1999 ( https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/the-name-of-the-game/)….
Feder is an excellent journalist (as is Kirk), but Miner should get one thing straight: Feder also plays favorites. If you have any doubt about this, do a Nexis search on the number of times Feder mentions or writes puff pieces about certain broadcasters. For example, the frequency that Beyond the Beltway host and Museum of Broadcast Communications chief Bruce DuMont’s name appears in Feder’s column–and the glowing praise Feder heaps on any of DuMont’s work–is sickening. But the one thing that Feder’s favorites all have in common is that they go to him first with “scoops.”
Feder presented Dumont with a lifetime achievement award from the Publicity Club of Chicago in 2018 – which makes sense because nobody got better publicity – or lack of – from Feder than Dumont!!
https://x.com/robertfeder/status/999141551853965312
When Feder covered Dumont’s ‘retirement’ in 2017 ( https://robertfeder.dailyherald.com/2017/11/29/robservations-bruce-dumont-retiring-broadcast-museum/), a reader left a comment:
I had occasion to work with Bruce Dumont. One of the most officious people I have ever met.
Another reader said he had to look up ‘officious’ but that’s not how he would describe Dumont. She responded:
….the treatment I received at the hands of Mr. Dumont was real and disturbing. Unless you lived through it, you would have no way of knowing. You wish to defend him and, that is your right. I am speaking from personal experience. Respect that, please.
I bet a lot of people have similar stories to tell.
A footnote, this is what I said about DuMont back in 2012:
https://www.tdogmedia.com/2012/11/bruce-dumont-played-for-the-fool-again.html
I know it’s a little more lighthearted than what you said, but I never was a fan of the guy, and not just because of his politics.
Thank you for the information.
Terence
Thank you for listening.
The story from the Cultural Center days is that Paul Harvey told Dumont the Radio Hall of Fame could never induct Howard Stern as long as Harvey was still breathing. Dumont needed Harvey’s money. Someone who worked at the MBC in the 90’s said to me: ‘If Paul Harvey’s dog could write a check Bruce would let it into the Hall of Fame.’
I forgot something yesterday. You wrote above: ‘After more than 200,000 visitors came through the doors, attendance plunged after MBC started charging for admission according to a Chicago Reader report from 2015.’ The same person who worked at the MBC in the 90’s at the Cultural Center told me that no one kept track of attendance. Admission was free – ie, no tickets were sold – and there was no turnstile you wlaked through that would record how many people passed through on any given day. The MBC seems to have just copied the Cultural Center’s attendance numbers – because if you walked into the Cultural Center in the 90’s you PROBABLY stepped foot inside the MBC for at least 5 seconds right? – which they then used to convince Springfield to give them millions in taxpayer money because of course the museum will be a huge tourist attraction once it opens!
The actual number of admission tickets sold at the MBC on State St in 2012 – when it was open for the last six months of the year – was around 5,800. ( Yes I’ve seen the numbers.) The MBC was open all 12 months of 2013…and sold only 5,300 tickets. That’s obviously a lot less than 200,000 – and the MBC was projecting attendance of 240,000 (!!!) for the first year in press releases the year before it opened on State St.
Dumont claimed Blagojevich and his people wouldn’t give him taxpayer money to finish construction because of politics. But maybe Blago’s administration was just better at research than Pat Quinn and John Cullerton.