Property transfers p. B6
October 14, 2020
Homes
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LITTLE HELP? Hemingway Foundation board chairman John Berry says the birthplace museum’s revenue this summer due to the pandemic was unsustainable.
ALEX ROGALS/Staff Photographer
House museums hit hard times
Hemingway, Wright attractions saw revenue shortfalls of 80% this summer By LACEY SIKORA
W
Contributing Reporter
ith the COVID-19 pandemic hitting Illinois just as spring began, local house museums found themselves in desperate times. Typically, spring and summer are the busiest seasons for both tourists and fundraising for the Hemingway Birthplace, the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio and Pleasant Home. This year, stay-at-home orders shuttered the house museums, and social distancing guidelines, on top of tourists wary of travel, curtailed the number of visitors who were
able to visit this summer. Decreased revenue from ticket sales has led the local organizations to get creative with their fundraising efforts. On Sept. 28, the Hemingway Foundation announced a fundraising campaign called – to make no mistake about its purpose -- “Help Us Keep the Doors Open” for the Hemingway Birthplace Museum, 339 N. Oak Park Ave. Keith Strom, the foundation’s executive director, said in a press release that the campaign is directly tied to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic during which state-mandated closures for most of the spring and summer had a severe economic impact on revenues. The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, meanwhile, was forced to cancel its largest annual fundraiser, the Wright Plus Housewalk, this spring. In May, the trust laid off 25 percent of its workforce. Faced with steeply declining revenues from tours at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, 951 Chicago Ave.,
and purchases at the gift shop, the trust sent out its annual appeal out in August, roughly two and a half months early. They also doubled their planned fundraising goal to $200,000. Tom Gull, director of development for the FLW Trust, says that generous donations from board members and others helped them in the spring, but the trust is still looking to raise roughly $160,000 by the end of the year. While both the Hemingway Foundation and the FLW Trust applied for and received some aid in the wake of pandemic, it was not enough to make up for the lost revenue. John Berry, chairman of the board of the Hemingway Foundation, said that revenue dropped close to 80 percent. “From April to August in 2019, we had revenue of $92,662,” he said. “In 2020 for that same period, it was $16,786. You can’t sustain that.” The story was the same at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home See MUSEUMS on page B4
October 14, 2020 ■ Wednesday Journal/Forest Park Review
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