Rock and Roll Annex Is Not Here to Stay 
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: December 4, 2009
Barely a year after it opened in SoHo, the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Annex in New York City is closing. The parent hall of fame in Cleveland confirmed on Friday that its affiliate, a $9 million investment envisioned as part of a broader national expansion, would shut its doors on Jan. 3.
No explanation for the closing was offered in the brief news release issued on Thursday by S2BN Entertainment, one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s partners in the venture, or by a spokeswoman for the Cleveland museum. But the 25,000-square-foot annex opened last November, just as the economic crisis was gaining force, and took a three-year lease in a relatively inconspicuous basement space below an Old Navy store at 76 Mercer Street.
“There’s no doubt the economy factored into our leaving,” Caren Bell, a spokeswoman for S2BN Entertainment, said on Friday afternoon. “But over all, we had a good year. We’re moving on to the next phase and exploring opportunities to tour the exhibition.”
When asked if the annex was profitable, she repeated, “We had a good year.”
The museum took on three partners in the annex, and under the terms of the governing agreement, those partners were to finance and operate the project, with the Cleveland hall of fame retaining oversight of all aspects of the operation. S2BN Entertainment is led by Michael Cohl, who recently became the lead producer of a future production of “Spider-Man” on Broadway and who is a former chairman of the Live Nation concert promotion and management group. The other participants are Jam Exhibition and Running Subway, which have produced museum exhibitions and musical theater and multimedia concert programs.
Margaret Thresher, a spokeswoman for the Hall of Fame in Cleveland, said that its partners had decided to “explore similar opportunities to tour this concept or place it in other cities.”
In contrast to the Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which offers a general history of rock ’n’ roll, the annex has a focus on New York’s role in the development of rock and pop culture. A 1957 Chevy of Bruce Springsteen’s, teenage correspondence between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, one of Bob Dylan’s harmonicas, memorabilia from the punk mecca CBGB, and the oversize suit David Byrne wore in the Talking Heads film “Stop Making Sense” are among the items on display.
The annex also has a special presentation called “John Lennon: The New York Years,” and it opened with a show devoted to the Clash.
Initial projections talked of the annex’s drawing in around half a million visitors a year, but Ms. Bell declined to provide figures on actual attendance or revenues. “We are not giving out numbers,” she said.
General admission to the annex is $26.50, compared with $22 at the main museum in Cleveland, which also offers more generous discounts for children and those over 65 than the annex does. Visitors typically spend four or five hours looking at the Cleveland exhibits, whereas an estimate of the time required for a full viewing at the annex, even with its high-technology features and club ambience as lures, is less than two hours.
“In New York you have to prove yourself, whether you’re a sports team or a museum,” Joel Peresman, president of the Hall of Fame Foundation, told The New York Times last November, just before the annex opened. “We have an important story to tell. And you have to have something interesting and compelling. Otherwise, New Yorkers are going to blow it off.”
www.nytimes.com For those interested in visiting before it closes,
Goldstar is offering $13.33 tickets.
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