Dimmer Switch on Seattle Center Chihuly Exhibit's Bright Financial Future?

This Seattle University piece is one of the many Chihuly glass artworks you can see for free around Seattle.

One of the reasons that the cash-strapped Seattle Center has been an advocate of the Wright family's proposal to build a 55,000-square-foot exhibit for Dale Chihuly's glass artwork on Center grounds is purely financial: The agreement is that Chihuly exhibit will lease their space for $350,000 a year, rising to $500,000, and if the Space Needle isn't good for it, who is?

But what if glass turns out not to be the cash cow the Center expects? From Tacoma comes the news that their Museum of Glass has had an eight percent drop in revenue, and are laying off 20 percent of their staff. Attendance, which had been around 165,000, is projected to come in around 150,000 for FY 2010-11.

As Chihuly was the reason for the Museum of Glass's existence--Tacoma wanted to celebrate their native son--this news casts into doubt the Wright family's rosy projections: "[T]he paid-entry exhibit, proposed by the Space Needle Corp., is predicted to bring 400,000 visitors and $1.1 million in city revenue a year," reported Seattlepi.com. 

The Seattle Times broke the private analysis down further, noting that those 400,000 visitors were to be new to the Center--in addition to the Center's usual draw--and would be willing to pay a $12 entry fee. As it happens, that fee exactly matches the general admission to Tacoma's Museum of Glass.

Interestingly, while the Center's citizens committee was dubious about KEXP's funding plan, they saw nothing to worry about in a private analysis that showed a single exhibit would boost Center attendance by 242 percent over a whole museum's audience (besides featuring a number of exhibitions, the Museum of Glass features live glass-making in its Hot Shop).