fallen_scholar

I shouldn't be snippish about this, but I'm going to be. One can't always be the better man.

Today, in museum_geeks, there was a poster who was promoting the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History. Never heard of it? Not terribly surprising. I can't really get a date off the website as to it's origins, but I can't imagine that it's all that old.

The curious thing about this museum? It doesn't exist. Okay, the museum exists but there's no physical location where the museum exists. They have researchers out in the field, research collections and a gift shop, but no actual musem.

This I find endlessly facinating, and not just for the scam potential. I suppose it's good to get your footwork done before you commit to anything, but couldn't have they, I don't know, rented a storefront or something?

But after doing a little more research (starting here with an article in the Boca Raton News) the whole thing seems a little less off the wall. Well, almost, except that it gets progressivly stranger and stranger with each turn.

Specifically what happened was the Cartoon Musem decided to move on up to New York, which, naturally, lead to devolpers coming in and turning the building into a mall. But these developers have a heart (or an interest in some sort of tax break) and decided to house also the local Public Broadcasting station's offices and the Graves Museum of Archaeology and Natural
History (named for it's founder, Gypsy Graves).

The Graves Museum, formerly located...well, no where either, really. It used to be on U.S. 1, basically a museum amongst gas stations and franchise resturants, but then went under. While it was going under, it was trying to move into a space in the new development. So there was an opening and some enterprising characters decided "hey, let's still put a museum in there!" In fact, some highly enterprising characters, as the project is spearheaded by a person who has yet to actually graduate from college.

There's suspiciously little mention of how the developers feel about this idea, which leaves me a little concerned, but you have to imagine that if not there, they'll go somewhere else.

Why do I have the feeling like I could take this story and spin it off into one of those popular non-fiction books?