Washington, DC has no shortage of museums. They range from the National Air
and Space Museum, part of the most visited museum complex in the world, to
the seriously niche, such as the Bead Museum (“promoting cultural
understanding through the interpretation of beads”).
Most of them are also free. So it came as something of a surprise when, a
couple of years ago, a new kid blew into town and charged admission. And not
a paltry amount, but a real chunk of change - about £10.
Won’t last, the nay-sayers said: who in their right mind is going to pay 18
bucks to visit a museum when there are dozens for free down the road? The
answer is, about 750,000 people a year.
The International Spy Museum won over customers because, in a city where its
counterparts are sometimes more than a little po-faced, it didn’t take
itself too seriously. It walks a fine line between fact (talking heads of
CIA spooks, Stasi tool kits, lots on Enigma) and fantasy (007’s DB5, clips
of Matt Helm), but, as someone who likes a good spy scandal, I came out
better informed than when I went in.
If you have ever enjoyed a John le Carré novel, you will find much to enjoy at
the ISM. And, thanks to various interactive screens, so will kids - over-12s
can even take an hour-long Operation Spy adventure course (£8) that involves
cracking codes, evading traps and virtual shoot-outs.
Such has been the success of the ISM, it has spawned a near-imitator, the
National Museum of Crime & Punishment - here, for “spy”, read “cops and
robbers”. It opened in May and follows a similar pattern to the ISM, with
exhibits such as Bonnie and Clyde’s shot-up Ford - well, the one from the
movie - next to the true story of Al Capone.
Conscious, perhaps, that it risks glorifying crime, it flips reality, in that
the cops’ section is actually better dressed than the robbers’ - and, thanks
to the CSI effect, there’s plenty on detection, including a corpse on a slab
for you to examine.
Sometimes, however, the presentation falls short, resorting to static boards
that offer plenty of reading and not much else. For the Eliot Ness display,
I wanted to see Robert Stack, hear Walter Winchell and enjoy Nelson Riddle’s
theme. I’d even have settled for a moving Kevin Costner, although I know
that’s often hard to spot.
Again, the children enjoyed the laser-shooting police-academy training, the
“driving a police patrol car” game, and firing up a CHiPS-style Harley. NMC&P,
however, has a lousy gift shop compared to ISM.
Now, the NMC&P has had its thunder stolen somewhat by another newcomer,
the Newseum, which has just opened a G-Men and Journalists exhibition,
charting the sometimes fractious relationship between the FBI and the fourth
estate. On display are the full-sized mock-up of a cutaway car used in court
to illustrate how the Washington snipers terrorised the city from the boot
of their vehicle and an installation of the Unabomber’s cabin. Somehow, such
exhibits seem more real here than in the Ripley-esque NMC&P and ISM.
In fact, the whole Newseum, which is dedicated to news-gathering in all its
forms, makes the other two seem a trifle tawdry. It is the most expensive of
the three in every sense - £11 to get in, £250m to create - but you can see
where the money has gone, because the building itself is a stunner, a glass
cube bang on Pennsylvania Avenue (just along from the J Edgar Hoover
Building, FBI headquarters and the ugliest structure on the strip), with an
expansive view of the Capitol from its sixth-floor terrace.
Compared to espionage and armed robbery, the news might sound a dry subject,
but the presentation is executed with considerable panache, including
printing off 50 front pages from around the world every day and displaying
them on the sidewalk.
