After Roanoke’s Center in the Square announced in December it would not renew the lease for the Science Museum of Southwest Virginia, a Center employee took to social media with a message that sounded like “good riddance.”
“How much of the science museum is actually museum anyway?” asked Nic Schell, the head of a pinball museum operated by the Center in the Square.
“Most of it is old stuff from the 80’s …. It’s 2026, folks. Science museums across the world are changing and becoming more interactive and interesting. Let’s move forward instead of clinging to the past.”
The Facebook post put an exclamation point on Center in the Square’s recent emphasis on splashy, money-making attractions, which no longer left a place for the Science Museum and its school-focused education mission.
The Science Museum was one of the five original tenants of Center in the Square, which was envisioned in the late 1970s as a cultural hub that would help revitalize downtown Roanoke.
Individuals and business leaders raised $10 million — a local record at the time — to rehabilitate an abandoned seed warehouse at the corner of Campbell at Market Square.
The deal was that Center in the Square would provide free rent to museums and the theater, which would draw foot traffic back downtown.
The Center has been a huge success. But from the start there were signs that culture and commerce might prove to be an uneasy fit.
This is the first installment of a two-part story of how the Center shifted its focus from providing nonprofits with rent-free space downtown to demanding those tenants fall in line with its drive to maximize foot traffic in every corner of the building.
The Center continues to tout its free-rent narrative, while quietly charging tenants for maintenance and utility fees that can cost nonprofits tens of thousands of dollars a year. It replaced a lobby art gallery with a candy store. It spun up arcade-like attractions built around pinball machines and video games.
The Center also opened a children’s museum that competed with the Science Museum, one of the cultural groups the Center was created to support.
When the Science Museum departs at the end of the year, Mill Mountain Theatre will be the last of the original five arts and cultural museums that moved into Center in the Square in 1983.
“I feel like we’re still meeting the original mission,” said John Rocovich, a local attorney who for many years has chaired the nonprofit Western Virginia Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, which owns and operates Center in the Square.
The goal, he said, has always been to draw foot traffic to downtown Roanoke.
Rocovich said that museums everywhere are forced to change with the times, to become more interactive and more exciting.
In the last 15 years, the Center has evolved from a landlord that provides a home for existing arts and cultural groups to a more entrepreneurial enterprise that has created its own attractions.
Not all of the Center’s ideas have been hits. A butterfly garden that was supposed to be a centerpiece was shut down after revenue fell short of expectations. And a few years ago the Center lost $1 million on an elaborate “scare experience” intended for the Halloween season.
Rocovich said the success of the Center-run Children’s Museum, Pinball Museum and Video Game Museum demonstrate a knack for creating exciting attractions that draw tourists and keep locals coming back time and time again.
“We think we have a good template,” Rocovich said.
The Center will soon have a chance to test its vision on a grander scale. After the Science Museum leaves, the Center will gain curatorial control of every inch of exhibition space in the building.
Bringing downtown back to life
An estimated 45,000 people swarmed downtown during the grand opening weekend in December 1983. Lines to get into the building stretched the length of Market Street.
They came to see for themselves the transformation of the 1914 McGuire Building, a five-story structure that was the first concrete and steel structure in Roanoke.
They also came to see what it looked like to have five arts and cultural organizations, which had been scattered around town, under one roof.
When they stepped inside the main entrance they saw the renovation had created an atrium with a massive open staircase that climbed to the top floor.
From the lobby, they could see a gallery of the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts or marvel at the new auditorium stage of Mill Mountain Theatre.
The staircase led them to more fine art on the second floor and exhibits from the Roanoke Valley Historical Society on the third floor. The stairs continued to the top two floors, where the Science Museum showed off a planetarium and new exhibits funded by a $1.4 million state grant.
“The new cultural center gives the downtown area a glow that other downtowns will envy, though few will be able to emulate it,” gushed a Roanoke Times editorial.
“The heart of many a central city has been eaten away by urban decay. Center in the Square gives Roanoke a healthy, vibrant heart.”
Outside but still close to all the art and science, farmers in overalls hawked apples, corn and peaches in the market stalls. A few paces from the Center’s entrance, the Roanoke Weiner Stand continued to serve up working-man lunches in a bun.
Somehow, enlisting arts and culture for the purpose of commerce clicked.
Downtown slowly came back to life. The popular dinner spot Billy’s Ritz expanded its hours to include lunch. Books Strings & Things opened a spacious record and book store across the street from the Center. By 1990, the smell of fresh roasted beans wafted across Market Square from Mill Mountain Coffee.
“It was serendipity,” banker Warner Dalhouse, who chaired the Center’s board, told The Roanoke Times in 1988. “It was the confluence of people, timing and needs all coming together at the same time.”
No one knew what to expect from having five nonprofits with independent boards in one building, which in turn was governed by its own nonprofit board.
The rule of thumb was that each organization would respect one another’s autonomy. In the same 1988 article, Dalhouse said he was surprised by what he called “prickliness” of cultural groups toward the Center, given they were granted a new building and given free rent.
All about the money
The plan for a five-story cultural center was audacious for a former railroad town on the edge of Appalachia.
Culture had long been considered an imperative for business leaders seeking to recruit talent from bigger cities with a symphony, art museums, theater.
Dotsy Clifton was president of Mill Mountain Theatre when Center was formed, and she served on a committee that allocated space in the building among the five organizations.
“It was so exciting — the idea of bringing these organizations together,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “Surprisingly, there were no egos involved. Everyone was grateful to be part of it.”
Money was tight. The city’s cultural and arts groups depended on donations from a small circle of wealthy families and an ever-shrinking roster of big companies based in the Roanoke Valley.
At one time or another, many of Roanoke’s cultural groups have faced a near-death financial experience. In 2009, Mill Mountain Theatre laid off all its employees and contemplated bankruptcy. A year later, the Taubman Museum of Arts whittled its staff from 52 to 17. The Roanoke Valley Arts Council, an original tenant in Center in the Square, went out of business.
Likewise, from the start, money was a challenge for Center in the Square.
The original building renovation estimate was $4.5 million. But costs kept climbing.
“We get a new figure every time we total it up,” G. Frank Clement, former president of Shenandoah Life Insurance Co., said in a 1983 interview.
The final cost was $10 million. Organizers went with hat in hand to Richmond for the final $2.5 million.
The fundraising did not end there.
The Center’s rent-free promise needed a $10 million endowment that would throw off enough interest income each year to cover utilities and building upkeep.
“We will build your new home at no cost to you and we’ll pay for your operating expenses as well,” Dalhouse told Cardinal News in a Feb. 27 telephone interview. “It was a deal they couldn’t refuse.”
The endowment came up short of its goal. Many donors were already tapped out by the renovation campaign.
To close the gap, the Center in the Square once again turned to the General Assembly, which in 1984 provided $250,000 a year in operating funds.
But just after the turn of the century, state appropriations began to dry up.
In 2001, the Center was forced to close on Mondays. The loss of state money was a blow to both the foundation and the five nonprofits housed there. Hardest hit was the Science Museum, which lost $750,000 in state funds, or 43% of its annual budget.
At this same time, the Center faced the prospect of empty space on the first two floors after the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, which would rebrand as the Taubman Museum, announced plans to expand and construct a stunning new building in downtown Roanoke, a block away on Salem Avenue.
Looking for a showstopper
Center in the Square’s financial squeeze and the impending loss of an anchor tenant created a twin crisis.
Jim Sears, the Center’s president and general manager, had to find new ways to generate revenue and to figure out what would go on the first and second floors.
For Sears, nothing was off the table. Even if it meant downshifting from culture to kitsch. In a planning meeting, he proposed a fundraiser featuring WWE professional wrestlers.
“We’ve got to reinvent this thing,” The Roanoke Times quoted him as saying in 2001. “We’ve got to do it in a different way.”
The Center’s turnaround plan was led by Tom Brock, a high-energy, blunt-talking retired General Electric executive who had managed the company’s plant in Salem.
In a Feb. 9 telephone interview with Cardinal News, Brock said he was a little surprised when he was asked to serve on the Board of the Western Virginia Foundation for the Arts and Science, the nonprofit that owns Center in the Square.
“My wife will tell you I’m a little culturally challenged,” he quipped.
But Brock was a bottom-line guy with a reputation at General Electric for turning around struggling lines of business. He was also known for an unflinching self-assurance in his ideas.
“People who know me, know that if I hear an idea that I’m 90% sure will work, the decision is made right there,” he said.
Soon, Brock had downtown in an uproar.
In 2007, word got out that the Foundation was seeking to remake Market Square with a $30 million renovation financed through historic tax credits. But Brock caused a public firestorm by refusing to provide sketches of plans that could uproot the farmer’s market and relocate the beloved Roanoke Weiner Stand.
“Brock: Leader has tendency to ruffle feathers,” read an April 13, 2007 headline in the Roanoke Times.
In a recent interview, Brock expressed frustration with nonprofit tenants whose missions were not focused singularly with the Center’s economic development imperative.
The problem, he said, is the Center was “operating like a charity.”
Tax records show that in 2012, the foundation that owns the Center rewrote its mission statement to emphasize its role in economic development.
The original mission statement read: “To support the acquisition and operation of cultural facilities for various non-profit organizations and supporting economic development in Western Virginia.”
The revised language reversed the order of its twin mission, placing business first. “To be an active participant in economic development and education, both locally and regionally, by helping assure the financial health of vital elements of Western and Central Virginia’s cultural quality of life.”
Brock said he saw the 2013 renovation as an opportunity to generate excitement about the building that would attract tourists and give locals a reason to visit several times a year.
In a recent interview, Brock recalled challenging the architects to come up with a lobby exhibit that the moment people stepped inside the lobby would create a sense of awe.
“I want to see something that is unusual,” Brock said. “I want something that is dramatic.”
Architects came back with the idea of a 5,500-gallon living coral reef aquarium. The giant tank would cost $150,000 a year to maintain, but Brock had what he considered a showstopper.
Low-performers are encouraged to leave
The lobby renovation also included a ticket office, where visitors could pay the entrance fee for any attraction in the building. The ticket office gave Center officials a better measure of how much foot traffic each tenant was generating.
Within a few years, the Center would ask two museums with low visitation rates to find another home.
In 2016, Sears asked the History Museum to leave. Attendance had dwindled. The Center wanted the museum’s space on the third floor to open an indoor playground for young children.
“It was asked of us to relocate,” recalled Nelson Harris, a member of the Historical Society board and a former mayor. “I completely understand. The original vision [of Center in the Square] was to bring people downtown.”
The Historical Society agreed to consolidate its operations along with the O. Winston Link Museum at the old Norfolk & Western passenger terminal on Shenandoah Avenue.
In 2024, the Harrison Museum of African American Culture, which had moved a decade earlier following the Center’s renovation, was informed that the Center wanted to make better use of its space.
“Foot traffic was a concern,” recalled E.B. White, executive director of the Harrison Museum. “They were trying to best leverage the space available.”
White said the Center staff was “quite supportive” in trying to find alternative space in the building. Eventually, through a strategic planning process, White said the Harrison Museum decided on its own that it would be better off relocating to Melrose Plaza, a city-backed complex designed to help revitalize Northwest Roanoke.
Instead of recruiting other nonprofits to Market Square, the Center created its own attractions. The Pinball Museum launched in 2015. Kids Square, a museum for young children, followed in 2017. Starcade, an arcade with vintage video games, came online in 2019.
Those departures left one last nonprofit museum, the Science Museum, in the crosshairs.
Coming Tuesday: Center in the Square takes on a more direct role in economic development by creating its own attractions.
