Ticket sales dropped by 15% at the Science Museum of Western Virginia in 2018.
To understand why, employees just had to look one floor below them.
Center in the Square had launched a children’s museum called Kids Square, an indoor playground that provides youngsters with a “S.T.E.A.M-enriched, educational, hands-on learning environment.”
The two museums are not identical. The Science Museum is designed for older children in school, while Kids Square is geared toward toddlers and preschoolers.
But there was enough similarity to generate competition.
In 2021, the Center presented the Science Museum a new lease agreement that effectively ended the Center’s rent-free promise to nonprofit arts and cultural tenants.
[Read part 1 of this story: Center in the Square: Institution to attraction?]
The lease included a maintenance and utility fee based on square footage. With two full floors, the Science Museum was hit the hardest. Tax filings show the Science Museum paid $51,000 in occupancy fees during the year ending June 30, 2024.
The end of free rent was part of Center in the Square’s decade-long pivot away from its original mission of providing financial support for a hub of nonprofit cultural groups, which could draw people to downtown Roanoke.
The Center took on a more direct role in economic development by creating its own attractions that Center officials designed to be more fun and interactive than a traditional museum.
Center officials found space for three new attractions — a video game arcade, pinball museum and the children’s museum — after encouraging two nonprofit museums that were not generating a large amount of foot traffic to find another home.
Last year, as Center officials questioned the Science Museum’s inability to generate sufficient foot traffic, the museum’s staff and board of directors began the process of finding a new home. The museum would need at least two years to locate a suitable location, raise money and build out the new space.
But its timeline was cut short on Dec. 4, when Center officials informed the Science Museum that its lease would not be renewed when it expires at the end of 2026.
Four days later, Science Museum Executive Director Mary Roberts-Baako emailed requesting a special meeting to discuss a short-term lease extension to provide enough time to prepare a new site.
Tara Marciniak, the president and general manager of Center in the Square since 2022, replied that the Center board would be glad to add the issue to the agenda of its board’s scheduled meeting in February.
But the conversation never took place. WFIR radio aired a story on Jan. 16 that the Science Museum was “being forced to vacate the premises.”
That left the Science Museum with a seemingly impossible task of moving its operation in less than 12 months.
To add injury to insult, a Center employee took to social media to trash the Science Museum.
Nic Schell, the head of the Center’s pinball museum, wrote on a Facebook post, “A few interesting pieces, yes, but having been there for decades? Why? Guests have been complaining for years.”
In an interview in February, Marciniak refused to disavow her employee’s disparaging comments about the Science Museum.
“I don’t know if I would word them exactly in this way,” Marciniak said.
She said her team had evaluated the Science Museum for several years and asked questions about whether the museum is “utilizing their space in the most effective way considering they are a science museum.”
“I don’t want to speak negatively about them, I truly don’t,” she added. “We have brought up some pretty detailed observations to their leadership before and have not quite seen the results that we were looking to see from those conversations.”
Marciniak is confident the Center will develop better and more profitable uses for the fourth and fifth floors that have been occupied by the Science Museum for 43 years. She said one option is for the Center to create its own “discovery-zone or science museum.”
When approached by Cardinal News for this story, the board of directors for the Science Museum said it would have no further comment about the circumstances of its departure from Center in the Square.
However, the board issued a statement after learning that Center in the Square is considering spinning up a competing museum.
“With a 55-year history in the Roanoke region, we know that a science museum is grounded in foundational science: inquiry, evidence, systems thinking, and age-appropriate learning progressions aligned to how children actually learn,” the statement said.
“That work happens with years of partnership with educators, school divisions, curriculum specialists, and national standards, not in isolation or overnight. The Science Museum of Western Virginia is the only science museum in the Roanoke region and the first science museum in Virginia.”
In a follow-up interview, Marciniak clarified that Center in the Square would not try to replicate the Science Museum. She said that new offerings at the Center could include “scientific components … but we won’t be teaching physics.”
“We don’t want to become the science museum. We’re visiting a lot of different museums of this kind to curate a new immersive experience,” Marciniak said.
“But I would encourage the Science Museum to find a location that’s more suitable for what they are interested in doing exhibit wise and, you know, do science to the best of their ability. I’m sure the community will respond well to it. It’s unfortunate that Center in the Square wasn’t quite the perfect home for it.”
The butterfly effect
From its start in 1970, the Science Museum’s collection included butterflies.
Visitors to the museum’s original location in a tiny basement in South Roanoke could examine several colorful specimens pinned in a case.
Center in the Square later urged the Science Museum to go big — really big — with butterflies.
As they planned for a major renovation that would be completed in 2013, Center officials scouted other museums for blockbuster ideas that could be incorporated into the five-story building in downtown Roanoke.
“We were looking around for something we thought was a good moneymaker,” James Sears, who was the Center’s president and general manager, recalled in a recent interview.
That’s when Sears came across butterfly gardens, which a decade earlier had been a hot trend in the museum world. A 1996 article in the Los Angeles Times called butterfly exhibits “relatively inexpensive to operate, almost always profitable.”
Imagine, Science Museum leaders were told, a garden filled with live butterflies that would swarm and delight visitors.
The Science Museum agreed to give it a go.
The Center directed architects handling the renovation to draw up a fifth-floor atrium covered by a massive glass and steel skylight, which would extend to a new rooftop garden. The atrium would be outfitted with a special climate control system that could make butterflies a year-round attraction.
Visitors wishing to experience the butterfly garden had to purchase a $4 add-on ticket.
But butterflies didn’t turn out to be the moneymaker Sears was hoping for.
By the time the Science Museum cut the ribbon on the atrium in May 2013, the butterfly garden boom had busted. The market for overseas butterflies, most of which were imported from Central America, took a hit when the U.S. Department of Agriculture imposed strict regulations to guard against the release of invasive species.
Butterflies live for only two weeks, so the Science Museum had to constantly restock. The insects alone were costing the museum $1,000 a month.
In 2019, the Science Museum announced it would close the butterfly garden. The museum would use the atrium for a project with Virginia Tech on food production. Staff announced the plans would be built around school curriculum standards.
But the Center staff said they had a better idea: a parakeet garden. Sears even agreed that the Center would buy the first block of colorful birds.
Once again, the Science Museum deferred to the Center on programming.
In September 2024, the parakeet garden was the scene of a flooding incident, which Center officials later cited in their decision not to renew the Science Museum’s lease.
Because parakeets generate a lot of bird poop, the Science Museum added a water hose to help staff clean up the mess.
One night, the hose burst, sending water cascading to lower floors and causing $830,000 in damage, forced the Children’s Museum to close for four months and led the Center’s carrier to cancel its property insurance.
Which feet count as foot traffic?
As an organization founded by teachers, the Science Museum considers school partnerships a core part of its mission.
In addition to providing a destination for school field trips, the Science Museum sends its education staff to teach in classrooms across the region.
The question of what constitutes “foot traffic” has become a hall of mirrors for the Science Museum in its conversations with the Center staff and board.
In its calculation, the Center only considers visitors who buy tickets through its box office, which allows the Center to extract a $2 fee for each sale. The Center doesn’t take into account the bulk of the Science Museum’s visitors, which include school groups, member passes and tickets sold at the museum’s front desk.
The Center began scrutinizing its tenants’ visitation rates about a decade ago when it shifted to a more bottom-line approach. It rewrote its mission to give less emphasis to supporting cultural groups and focused almost entirely on economic development.
“We took it from operating like a charity to operating like a business,” said Tom Brock, a retired General Electric executive who chairs a nonprofit that manages the Center’s $5.2 million endowment.
In 2016, three years after a major renovation, the Center asked the Roanoke History Museum to leave. Attendance had waned. The Center wanted the museum’s space on the third floor to create a Children’s Museum.
In 2024, the Center also cited foot traffic when it asked the Harrison Museum of African American Culture to find a new home.
In interviews with Cardinal News, Center officials created an equally bleak outlook for foot traffic to the Science Museum.
Marciniak, a Sears protégé who took over as president of Center when he retired in 2022, said the Science Museum drew only 13,000 people to its 40,000-square-foot space last year.
She noted that Starcade, a video gaming emporium that uses only 3,000 square feet, drew twice as many people.
When asked if the 13,000 count for the Science Museum included field trips and visits by museum members, Marciniak said she was aware of additional foot traffic, but that the only numbers she has to go on are receipts from the Center’s lobby box office.
“I just haven’t seen concrete information,” Marciniak said.
Later, the Science Museum’s board of directors disputed Marciniak’s claim, saying that on three occasions last year it provided the foundation board with a report showing that 70,349 people came through its doors last year.
A copy of the report obtained by Cardinal News breaks down the 57,000 visitors who do not show up in Center’s box office statistics. These included 21,459 people from school groups, 8,170 Science Museum members, 6,754 free admission to low-income residents. It also included 1,889 people who bought tickets at the Science Museum front desk.
The report also showed that Science Museum outreach beyond the four walls of the Center included 5,246 students in area schools and 2,144 children in local after-school programs.
“Given the multiple presentations of this information, we are unclear why questions regarding attendance and impact continue to be raised,” the Science Museum Board said in a written statement.
Provided with a chance to respond, Marciniak said she had yet to see any paperwork that would “substantiate” the Science Museum’s foot traffic.
“I would like to see where they are coming up with those numbers,” she said.
Living rent-free in their heads but not exactly in the Center
Another point of contention with the Science Museum was a Center decision to abandon its much-touted policy of providing free rent to its nonprofit tenants.
The rent-free narrative is still very much alive in Center fundraising appeals. Visitors who enter the Center’s lobby off Campbell Avenue are greeted by a sign that reads: “Did you know? Center in the Square supports 10 nonprofits in the Roanoke, Virginia area by providing free rent, utilities, maintenance, and security.”
But five years ago, as leases came up for renewal, the Center added a “maintenance/utility offset.”
The maintenance and utility charge was added at the end of Sears’ 35-year tenure.
The Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation has recognized Sears for “making an undeniable mark on the historic fabric of Roanoke as he saw the potential of combining the rehabilitation of vacant historic buildings with the space needs of the cultural organizations.”
Over the years, the foundation that owns Center in the Square has expanded its real estate footprint to include four other buildings in downtown Roanoke. As a result, the Center has become far more reliant on entrance fees and rental income from its commercial tenants.
During the pandemic, Sears tasked Marciniak, who was then his fundraiser, with rewriting the Center’s rent-free policy to include an expectation that its nonprofit tenants had an obligation to draw people downtown.
Marciniak said in an interview that she could find nothing in Center documents that nonprofits would receive free rent in perpetuity.
The need to place conditions on free rent, Marciniak said, became even more apparent during COVID when the Science Museum remained closed for a year, even after other Center tenants had reopened their doors.
In 2021, the Center presented nonprofits with lease renewals to include a maintenance fee, which she said was a reasonable step to ensure nonprofit tenants continue to generate foot traffic and update exhibits to attract tourists and locals alike.
The Center assesses the fee through a $2 fee charged to each ticket that a nonprofit sells through the Center box office. Tenants that fail to sell enough tickets to offset the entire maintenance fee must pay the difference at the end of the fiscal year.
In the year ending June 2024, the Science Museum paid a maintenance fee of $51,000, according to the museum’s tax records.
Center officials are careful to avoid the word “rent” when discussing the maintenance fee.
“It was never, ever ‘rent,’” insisted Amy Wilson, the Center’s chief financial officer.
John Rocovich, a lawyer who chairs the Western Virginia Foundation for the Arts and Culture, which owns and runs Center in the Square, said he is comfortable making the pitch that the Center provides free rent.
“I feel like we’re still meeting the original mission,” he said.
Tom Brock, a retired General Electric executive who chairs a nonprofit that manages the Center’s $5.2 million endowment, has brought a more bottom-line approach to the Center.
But one longtime Center advocate is upset that the Center has broken its rent-free promise.
“It’s a damn shame,” Warner Dalhouse, a retired banker who chaired the Center board for years, said in a Feb. 27 telephone interview.
“Brock is just a bulldozer,” he said, “and he doesn’t believe in the original concept. He thinks the [nonprofit] organizations should pay their own way, which is diametrically opposed to the original concept.”
Dotsy Clifton, a former Mill Mountain Theatre board chair and longtime Center donor, said that she understands the need for museums today to innovate and find ways to rotate exhibits and draw crowds.
Clifton, who fondly recalls the collegial feeling back when cultural groups moved into Center in the Square, said it’s unfortunate museums couldn’t find a way to work collectively to preserve the original idea of a cultural hub.
In her response to the Center’s annual fundraising appeal last year, Clifton said she included a check along with a note, which voiced her concerns and let the Center know it could not count on her continued financial support.
“I still think Center in the Square is still a vital part of downtown and I certainly can understand why people support it,” she said. “But I think it has moved far enough from its mission that I no longer want to donate.”
Creating attractions
The Science Museum’s pending departure will give Rocovich and Brock free rein to put their curatorial touch on all of the exhibit space in Center in the Square. Mill Mountain Theatre will be the last nonprofit tenant with an independent board of directors.
On her LinkedIn page, Marciniak said that she was “looking forward to adding a new layer of tourism-driving attractions to our region in the coming years.”
Marciniak said she expects the Center will allocate more space to Pinball Museum (which opened in 2015) and STARCADE (which opened in 2018 and later was renamed STARCADE Video Game Museum).
During a tour of the Children’s Museum (opened in 2017), executive director Felicia Branham said, “Oh, we definitely could use more room.”
In his social media post blasting the Science Museum, Nic Schell touted what he called a “museumy” transformation of Center arcade attractions.
“Pinball will have historical displays, exhibits, and information in its new space,” Schell wrote. “STARCADE has long since featured interesting facts about their games.”
Amid the controversy about the Science Museum’s exit, the Center made a splash by announcing it was seeking $250,000 from the General Assembly to conduct a feasibility study of placing a giant Ferris wheel on top of the building.
With all but one of the arts and cultural groups departed, some say that compared to 40 years ago, Center in the Square has become more carnival midway than cultural hub.
The Center is trying to build on what it calls the success of creating attractions that draw tourists and locals downtown.
But not all ideas have been a hit.
In 2021, the Center invested $1 million in Blue Ridge Nightmares, an elaborate scare experience built inside a 30,0000-square-foot abandoned warehouse in the former American Viscose factory.
Marciniak said the Center planned to recoup its investment in Blue Ridge Nightmares over nine years.
But the attraction was short-lived.
The Center made a sizable capital investment in the property without securing a long-term lease to the warehouse. The Center had to write off the investment after developer Ed Walker Jr. purchased the entire property with plans to build a mixed-use community on site.
Rocovich said the project seemed like a chance worth taking. “In any enterprise, if you don’t have an occasional failure, you weren’t trying hard enough to be successful,” he said.
When asked why the Center chose to invest so much money in a project located a couple of miles from Market Square, Brock said the location was the best available that was near downtown.
In the last decade, the Center has drawn down its endowment by nearly 40 percent.
Endowments held by the Western Virginia Foundation for the Arts and Science and the Center in the Square Endowment Foundation fell from a combined $8.5 million to $5.2 million in the decade ending June 30, 2024, according to tax records filed by the two nonprofits.
Brock, loquacious during a nearly hourlong interview, became reticent when asked about the management of the Center’s endowment.
“This isn’t an area I’m willing to discuss with you,” Brock said.
The wheel of fortunes
Center officials are confident that revenue generated by immersive family experiences will be more than enough to keep the Center in a strong financial position.
Brock’s voice gets animated when talking about a possible Ferris wheel. He said that is exactly the kind of game-changer that could draw people downtown.
When Center in the Square applied for $20 million in historic tax credits in 2009, officials with the National Park Service seemed most concerned that none of the renovations alter the profile of the building.
Records on file with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources in Richmond include photographs of the roofline from more than a dozen street-level vantage points. There are questions about adding a few feet to a mechanical stack on the rooftop.
The Center has the right to make any changes to the building’s exterior profile now that more than five years have passed since the tax credits were certified in 2014, according to Jessica Ugarte, tax credit program supervisor for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
Asked if a massive Ferris wheel atop the building would be consistent with the spirit of the tax credits, Rocovich noted that if the project does proceed, structural issues likely would place the carnival ride on top of the city’s parking deck, not the Center in the Square building.
With or without a Ferris wheel, Marciniak is confident the revenue generated by immersive family experiences will be more than enough to keep the Center in a strong financial position.
She said for Center in the Square to thrive, it must continue to change and evolve.
“You can’t leave everything exactly as it was 42 years ago and expect to still be successful,” she said. “You’ve got to continually add-on and listen to the community and observe. What are people actually interested in experiencing downtown?”
A visitor who steps into the lobby today will have a different experience from anyone who attended the grand opening back in December 1983.
Today, visitors are greeted by Brock’s aquarium. The art gallery is gone, replaced by a candy store. Scattered around the lobby are a few of those claw machines, all lit up and ready to let you pay your money and take your chances on grabbing a stuffed animal.
Like Roanoke itself, the Center is a mix of highbrow and lowbrow.
You can attend a live play and take the elevator to a rooftop restaurant for a glass of wine and $56 serving of Chilean sea bass.
Or you can take the spiral staircase to the second floor, where you can plunk down $15 for unlimited plays of vintage pinball machines.
The Center is looking for its next big hit. Something that resonates with folks in the Roanoke Valley.
Brock is hoping it will be a rooftop carnival ride, which would offer incredible views of the valley and serve as a neon call and response to the Dr Pepper sign below and Mill Mountain Star above.
