Could art museum prompt a downtown transformation?

At the ceremonial groundbreaking for a new art museum three years ago, there was no mistaking the scale of Roanoke's dreams.

On that breezy, blue September morning in 2005, against the backdrop of a huge banner with a rendering of the new building, a succession of supporters and politicians spoke of the economic transformation of a city, and the region.

"This community is on the path to greatness," said Mark Warner, Virginia's governor at the time. U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte talked of "new frontiers."

And Heywood Fralin, then-president of the Art Museum of Western Virginia, said the new museum would "lead Roanoke and Western Virginia into the future and shape our destiny."

As Roanoke's quest for an ultra-modern, attention-getting $66 million art museum comes to its successful end, talk of what it might do for Roanoke and beyond sometimes seems surreal. Conceived to house the art museum's growing collection of American art, the downtown museum has become a symbol of Roanoke's rebirth: a swooping, curving, glimmering vision of a better day.

On Saturday, the Taubman Museum of Art will open its doors at last, with thousands of visitors expected for opening week.

With the building by Los Angeles architect Randall Stout finally a reality, can dreams of economic transformation come true as well?

From the beginning, project backers have pointed to Bilbao, the formerly-gritty seaport city in the Basque country of northern Spain, as an example of what could happen here. The opening of a branch of the Guggenheim Museum in 1997 made Bilbao an international tourist destination almost overnight, as people flocked to see the titanium-wrapped museum by celebrated architect Frank Gehry.

The Guggenheim has been a big success, attracting millions of visitors and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue for Bilbao, by multiple accounts. The phenomenon has been immortalized in the media and scholarly articles as "The Bilbao Effect."

Downtown changing

Whether Bilbao's success with the Guggenheim Museum can be fully replicated here -- or anywhere -- remains to be seen. (Gehry himself described "The Bilbao Effect" to the U.K.'s Times Online last summer as "a bunch of bull----.")

Even architect Stout, a former senior associate of Gehry's, has seemed uneasy with talk of economic transformation. "I hate to think one building takes the heat for transforming an entire city," Stout told The New York Times in December. And yet, downtown Roanoke is changing.

It has a mushrooming gallery scene and a swelling residential population as developers build new condominiums and apartments. There are nonresidential projects under way as well, including a restaurant and possible hotel on the edge of the museum site, and a new live theater blocks away on Campbell Avenue.

In some parts of downtown, meanwhile, property values have doubled since the museum project was announced, said Dennis Cronk, president and chief executive officer of Poe and Cronk Real Estate Group in Roanoke.

On the horizon are more projects planned for downtown that would, taken together, rival the $66 million spent on the art museum. Center in the Square is quietly raising money for a $20 million to $25 million remake. Cost estimates for renovations to the City Market Building have run as high as $7 million.

But the biggest downtown project on the horizon is a proposed $25 million to $35 million expansion to the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center, located just across the railroad tracks from the new museum.

The museum was a factor in the decision to look at expanding Roanoke's signature hotel, as was the new $59 million Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute, said Ray Smoot, chief operating officer of the Virginia Tech Foundation. The foundation owns the hotel.

All this -- and the museum hasn't opened yet.

"I think it's got the potential to have a huge impact," Ed Murphy, chief executive officer of Carilion Clinic, said of the new art museum. Combined with the other projects under way, he said, "it's going to be transformational."

No guarantees

The museum has always had its skeptics. Its design and location have been controversial. It has been compared to mountains and birds -- but also to the vomit of prehistoric monsters and the "Wreck of the Flying Nun."

Its projected $3.7 million in annual expenses, which is several times the museum's previous expenses at Center in the Square, has raised many eyebrows. The museum has increased ticket prices, to $8.50, from $3, for general admission, added a cafe and theater and beefed up its store offerings to increase earned revenue figures. It's also pursuing grants.

Still, "It remains to be seen if the inflow will cover the expenses," said Fralin, who is president of Medical Facilities of America and administrator of the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust, a major benefactor of the art museum.

Fralin declined to say if the Fralin Trust, which had $48 million in assets in fiscal 2006-07 and has contributed more than $13 million to the museum over the past decade, according to tax returns, would continue the same level of support. "This is everybody's museum, and all should support it," he said.

No one else is promising to help out, either. The city of Roanoke is standing by its policy of assisting cultural nonprofits with one-time capital expenses, not operating expenses. And House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, said there is not much the General Assembly can do for the museum right now, given the state's budget situation.

But Fralin said it would be a mistake to judge the success of the new museum by its balance sheet.

"You need to look at it in terms of, 'Is this the kind of cultural organization that will attract researchers and professors to Virginia Tech? Will people be willing to come here and start businesses?' There are lots of components to economic development that are not obvious right on the surface."

Murphy, who is a former art museum board president, agreed. "It's less about, 'Are they profitable?' than 'Are they sustainable?'" he said. "It's not there to make a profit."

How others fared

Other museums have reinvented themselves with bold, eye-catching buildings in recent years, sometimes with spectacular results.

When Volkswagen announced in July that it will build a new billion-dollar manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., it made the announcement at the Hunter Museum of American Art. In 2005, the bluff-top museum completed a $22 million expansion designed by Stout.

Volkswagen cited "the intangibles the community has to offer" as a reason for its decision, said Hunter director Robert Kret. The area around the museum, which overlooks the Tennessee River, has also seen "a tremendous amount of condominium development" recently, Kret said, and the Chattanooga skyline these days often includes cranes.

But Kret cautioned against drawing too many parallels with Roanoke. The Hunter's improvements were part of $120 million waterfront renovation project that also included the Tennessee Aquarium, parks, roads, bridges and public art, he said. The Hunter was "a piece of the pie."

In Ohio, the Akron Art Museum's $35 million expansion, which opened last year, more than tripled the museum's space and doubled its attendance, said Director and Chief Executive Officer Mitchell Kahan. Development in the neighborhood has included several galleries, an art center, a condominium high-rise and a couple of restaurants. But the museum is in a medical development corridor, and a library expansion took place nearby at the same time, so it's difficult to say what prompted what, Kahan said.

He cautioned against comparing Akron and Roanoke's art museum projects to Bilbao's. The Bilbao Guggenheim was part of a multibillion-dollar effort that included an airport, public transport system and convention center, Kahan said. The Roanoke and Akron projects "are not really the same."

Maybe not. But on the eve of the Taubman Museum's opening, enthusiasm here is sky-high.

"This is the most exciting building in Virginia," Fralin said. "We've already been in The New York Times twice and The Washington Post twice."

All that attention will bring dividends, Fralin said. "We're going to get visitors."

How many is anyone's guess. The museum has printed 14,000 free tickets for opening day but has plans to accommodate more should the need arise, external affairs director Kimberly Templeton said. The museum has no projected attendance figures for opening day, she said.

The Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau does not track calls about the art museum, Executive Director Dave Kjolhede said. "The vast majority of our calls are about the foliage change."

Unseen impact

With tourists will come money, some of which will be spent at area restaurants and hotels, project backers say. The museum itself will generate wages through its 45 jobs, many of them new, and help create new jobs in the service sector.

A museum business plan from several years ago projected an annual economic impact on Roanoke of $29 million.

By comparison, Center in the Square, which opened downtown in 1983, pumped $20 million annually into the local economy until visitation began to drop off several years ago in the wake of state budget cuts, Center President Jim Sears said.

Georganne Bingham, executive director of the Taubman Museum, said the study was done "before the museum became the museum it is today. We feel that the impact on the economy is going to be far greater than was first estimated by the business plan."

Some of the impact will be hard to measure. Murphy said the new museum already is a selling point in bringing new employees to Carilion.

"I can think of a number of discussions where we have been recruiting people," Murphy said. "The art museum has been a real point of interest."

"The more vibrant the cultural life of our region, the more appealing the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center is when attracting and retaining employees," Smoot said. "The same is true for attracting faculty to Virginia Tech." The city, meanwhile, looks at the new museum as a "people-generator ... adding more to the critical mass of activity downtown," according to Brian Townsend, Roanoke's assistant city manager for community development. Commercial, residential and cultural development are all pieces of the puzzle. "They all kind of feed off each other."

But Townsend also said there's more to do.

"That critical mass is all relative. The art museum is certainly a milestone," he said. "But it's not a place where you just stop. You never arrive."