After two decades, the National WWII Museum is done expanding. Here’s what’s next. – NOLA.com Feedzy

Nick Mueller and Stephen Ambrose thought it would be a small educational pavilion by Lake Pontchartrain.

As the often-told story goes, three decades ago, when the two University of New Orleans historians began discussing a museum commemorating the Allied landings on D-Day, the initial plan was to raise a million dollars and build something near UNO’s campus.

The plans, of course, changed a bit.

This week, during a ceremony at the National WWII Museum in the Central Business District, Mueller, who retired as CEO of the museum in 2017, will be on hand to see the completion of his and Ambrose’s once-modest project. Museum officials will open the Liberation Pavilion, the $47 million exhibition that focuses on the end of the war, the Holocaust and the war’s continued legacy.

The pavilion is the final piece of the museum’s permanent exhibition. It is also something of a capstone for the museum’s six-acre campus, which  that now includes a hotel, food and beverage outlets, a theater and a research center dedicated to the study of the war.

Built at a cost of some $420 million, the campus has drawn millions of visitors to New Orleans since its opening on June 6, 2000.

And while Mueller, 83, has passed the torch, he and his successor, Stephen Watson, agree on the next challenge: ensuring that the lessons of the 20th century’s most devastating armed conflict aren’t forgotten as the last 120,000 American World War II veterans pass away.

“The future is really in educating,” Mueller said.

A major attraction

Initially known as the D-Day Museum, the institution has outgrown the earliest vision of its founders and is now a major New Orleans attraction as well as an important site of scholarly research about the war.

For tourism boosters, the museum provides a counterweight to the rakish appeal of Bourbon Street. Its gray concrete exhibition halls pull a stream of visitors down Camp Street and into the CBD from hotels and attractions in the Warehouse District and French Quarter. The Higgins Hotel, completed in 2019, is a regular host to veterans and other tour groups.

The new Liberation Pavilion connects to the other parts of the museum via the Col. Battle Barksdale Parade Ground, a piazza-sized outdoor gathering space shaded by the angular Bollinger Canopy of Peace that stretches above the campus.

The museum, the hotel and food, beverage and retail outlets employ about 650 people, Watson said. According to a museum study, its economic impact has been estimated at $2.4 billion over the past two decades.

While museum leaders have been completing the final exhibition spaces in recent years, they’ve also added new research spaces and educational offerings. Two floors in the Hall of Democracy, which opened in 2019 and houses a research library, are devoted to scholarly research about the war and its impact, said Watson, as is Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy.

“Along with our curators, that really represents the intellectual core of the museum; that is where our historians, researchers, educators, media producers, our distance learning specialists are,” Watson said. “We see a lot of growth, a lot of need and opportunity to build on those programs.”

Watson said the museum has an agreement with Arizona State University for an online master’s degree in World War II studies, where 200 students are currently enrolled.

Funding and support

Watson, a Scotland native who joined in 2002, was initially focused on raising money and building the museum’s donor base, which grew from 2,500 in 2002 to more than 100,000 two years later.

The museum ultimately raised $275 million from private donors, including the largest single gift of $20 million from Louisiana shipbuilder Donald T. “Boysie” Bollinger.

The museum’s initial momentum in the 1990s came from Ambrose’s high profile as a prolific and author of popular histories, including “Band of Brothers,” which became an HBO miniseries. Ambrose died in 2002.

It received a big national boost when two veteran members of the U.S. Senate, Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, championed the project. They helped secure the National WWII Museum designation by Congress in 2004 and the federal money that followed.

Using technology

Over the years, architects and design firms focused on curatorial techniques that linked new technologies to the personal stories of war to bring the museum alive.

Patrick Gallagher, whose firm Gallagher & Associates has designed museums and exhibits around the world, said that he and Mueller realized early on that the museum had to be designed not only for the Greatest Generation but for young people and future generations.

“Nick said to me, ‘Look, if we’re going to succeed, these visitors need to be young, 12-year-old students with a passion for understanding history,'” Gallagher said. “That meant designing a backbone into the museum that allowed us to tell personal stories in an accessible way.”

Watson said projects now on the agenda include a significant upgrade to the original D-Day exhibit, which is more than two decades old. The Beyond All Boundaries experience will also be updated next year to include a new “interactive oral history” theater.

“The other big focus for us in the future is the expansion of our educational outreach programs, through distance learning, through residential programs here, scaling up our digital content production,” Watson said.

“I think given the nature of our story and our mission, which has relevance in every corner of this country, I think we have a responsibility to do more and to bring this story to the public in new ways,” he said.

Mueller said that aspect of the museum — the lessons that should be drawn from World War II — underlines the importance of the museum’s future educational mission.

“The memory and the meaning of the war is where the future is,” Mueller said. “When you think of what’s going on right now in the world — Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan — all three are parts of the legacy of World War II, almost 80 years later.”