If a cultural organization's every act of ambition is to some degree a leap of faith, the Please Touch Museum is inching up to the greatest yawning gulf in its history.
In October, the 32-year-old children's museum will leave its squat, plain-Jane Center City brick home near the Franklin Institute for the grand marbled volumes of a renovated Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park.
Its annual budget will go from $4 million to $9 million, its exhibition space more than tripling to 38,000 square feet.
Reluctantly, the museum is making this transition after taking a hard look at its fund-raising drive and cutting plans for a $5 million reserve fund.
All this, while pinning its hopes on nearly tripling attendance - to an average of 476,000 from 180,000 visitors per year.
In some ways, the museum already has taken its big leap: It's well into spending its $44 million construction budget and already is putting the finishing touches on the renovation of Memorial Hall. Last week, in the enormous Beaux Arts souvenir from the 1876 Centennial Exposition, glaziers were putting in new Palladian windows. Roofers were working atop the octagonal carousel house, an entirely new structure that will house the restored Woodside Park Dentzel Carousel from 1924. Exhibits fabricated off-site will begin moving in this month.
Fund-raising for the museum's $88 million capital campaign still has a long way to go. With opening day a little more than six months away, the museum is $25.5 million shy of its finishing line.
Can it bridge the gap?
"I think we'll make goal, but not by opening day," says president and chief executive officer Nancy Kolb. "We've gotten money from people who didn't know our name five years ago, so it's a cultivation thing."
Whether it makes goal or not, Please Touch has taken out $60 million in debt to help cover the project's costs. Even if the full $88 million is raised, Please Touch does not plan to immediately pay down that debt, which is in the form of 30-year tax-exempt bonds.
The bonds carry an (average) fixed 4.93 percent interest rate, said Concetta Bencivenga, vice president of finance, while the museum anticipates a 5 percent to 6 percent return on investments made with a pool of money raised for the project's general support, which it calls the Museum Fund.
"The investment portfolio can grow and we can make sure those moneys are used to hold harmless the museum's general operating budget," said Bencivenga.
