Membership: Done-up Harley-Davidson Style
Let me just start out by saying that I am crazy-in-love with memberships. With joining. With belonging. At first I thought it was just a summer fling, as I dabbled in belonging to zoos. But no… more than 15 memberships later, at museums and zoos and aquariums across the nation, I am hard-core in love with membership. So becoming the manager of the Membership program for the Harley-Davidson Museum was far too good to be true… and yes, I have bought my membership (and like most of you who have also joined, I am now waiting patiently for my official...
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My First Harley-Davidson Memory...
My first Harley-Davidson memory? I was out with some of my high school buddies, when we stopped at the local H-D dealership for the heck of it. We were broke teenagers, but this was America! Even a broke, punk teenager had the right to dream. One of my friends was dreaming about getting a Harley someday. The rest of us were sitting on bikes trying hard not to get yelled at for anything. I thought the big baggers were beautiful, but being the skinny kid I was, the smaller sleeker bikes always appealed to me. I didn’t think the two...
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Inspiration Goes Industrial
Design & Construction There was no question about our inspiration for the design of the Museum. It had to be factories. After all, Harley-Davidson is an industrial icon and Milwaukee is an industrial town, so that part was easy. All the materials are those you would find in factories – brick, glass and steel. Even the shapes mimic what you would find in industrial buildings, most notably the four towers of the Museum. But picking the exact colors and finishes was a little trickier. For example, we looked at several iterations of brick. At one point, we planned to build...
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Grand Opening
Wow, How Did We Get Here?
My Role: Late summer of 2004, when I was offered the position of Museum Director, I was beside myself excited. Talk about the opportunity of a lifetime. A chance to build the Harley-Davidson Museum. I may have the coolest job on the planet! So for the past 3 ½ years, my role has been to lead a terrific team to develop a kick-ass Museum. There’s been a ton to manage to bring this dream to life – building design, site design, exhibit development, restaurant development, construction, opening, operations... And now that we are almost there, I sometimes wonder… wow, how...
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Construction
