FROM a second-floor arched window at 26 Broadway, near the start of the Canyon of Heroes ticker-tape parade route in Lower Manhattan, Philip Schwalb can see beyond the Battery to the Statue of Liberty. He watches tourists heading to Liberty and Ellis Islands and thinks about those who will honor the fallen of 9/11 at the World Trade Center Memorial when it is done.
From his perch in John D. Rockefeller’s old Standard Oil Building, Mr. Schwalb is confident that his own institution, the new Sports Museum of America, will thrive.
“For me, it’s clear,” he said last month, amid two stories of construction that is expected to be done for an early May opening. “Sports are truly transcendent, like music and art, which can take you away from the mundane. And like music and art, sports transcend cultural barriers.”
Mr. Schwalb’s ambitious plan to build a sports Smithsonian came to him as he walked through the nearly empty Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., on Sept. 10, 2001, his 39th birthday. What if this hall were near Lady Liberty and Wall Street? he asked himself. What if he made a museum that not only appealed to fans with artifacts and interactive exhibitions the tangible manifestations of sports history found in halls of fame around the country but also inspired and educated them?
“It’ll be flat-out fun,” Mr. Schwalb said, describing the fruits of that vision seven years ago. “But our test is to make it intellectually stimulating and emotionally moving.”
Carl Weisbrod, president of Trinity Church’s real estate division and ex-president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, is enthusiastic about the museum.
“There are few really attractive, magnetic paying attractions in Lower Manhattan,” he said. “The museum is very appealing for tourism, at a natural location that will pick up a huge amount of pedestrian traffic from the Statue of Liberty.”
Mr. Schwalb, who once worked for Edwin A. Schlossberg’s design firm, first financed his idea by borrowing $120,000 against his credit cards. The stake enabled him to create plans that led to raising $57 million in tax-exempt Liberty Bonds, a federal program created to spur post-9/11 development in Lower Manhattan, and $36 million in private investment.
Mr. Schwalb predicts that the museum will have one million visitors its first year, several times the attendance of halls of fame in more distant locales, like the one devoted to baseball in Cooperstown in upstate New York; to boxing in Canastota, even farther upstate; and to professional football in Canton, Ohio.
But Mr. Schwalb does not view those museums as competitors; indeed, he has partnership agreements with many of them. Instead, he will measure his success by other yardsticks: major city tourist attractions like the Museum of Modern Art, Madame Tussauds, the American Museum of Natural History and, when it reopens in November, the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
“If the Intrepid, which is a great piece of New York, and I think an interesting place to visit, can draw three-quarters of a million visitors to a difficult location, I really feel strongly we can draw one million,” he said.
The Heisman Trophy will have a home at the museum. It has been left without one ever since the Downtown Athletic Club, near Wall Street, closed after 9/11. The trophy’s original casting will become a gallery centerpiece. The museum will also be the home for the Billie Jean King International Women’s Sports Center’s hall of fame. The center was founded by the Women’s Sports Foundation to honor accomplishments by female athletes. Visitors will enter an auto-racing gallery by walking across original bricks from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and gaze upon Jimmie Johnson’s Nascar Sprint Cup-winning car from 2006. In the Olympics room, fans will be able to hold a javelin, hammer and shot-put.
In the baseball gallery, Willie Mays’s 1957 glove and a Joe DiMaggio home jersey will share space with computer screens showing 15 of the sport’s great events. In addition, the sneakers worn by Willis Reed of the New York Knicks when he was injured in Game 5 of the 1970 N.B.A. finals and six Chicago Bulls championship rings will be part of the basketball gallery’s road-trip theme.
Similarly themed galleries will exist for soccer, hockey, football, golf and other sports. But horse racing and boxing, once among the nation’s most popular sports but no longer, will be shoehorned into one gallery with participant sports like bowling.
An immersion theater will show a high-definition film on great moments in sports; and display cases in the auto racing gallery will darken every two minutes and turn into 15-by-8 1/2-foot screens, with one showing cars approaching fans, the other showing them racing away in high-decibel audio.
Mr. Schwalb said that his goal was not to poach fans from other halls of fame but to promote them in New York as places to go in the future. He has signed up 60 partners, including small sports-themed museums and national sports-governing bodies (the latter critical for their mailing lists). The deals give him access to their artifacts and membership lists in exchange for a share of an annual $2.5 million fund and a kiosk in the museum’s Hall of Halls, a gallery where the partners will be celebrated and promoted. The major holdout is the National Baseball Hall of Fame (artifacts were secured through private collectors), while the Pro Football Hall of Fame, once resistant, has now joined.
“Philip’s idea of our having a significant presence at the Sports Museum fit right into our long-term development goals,” said Stephen Perry, president of the football hall. “We need a presence in New York.”
Along the way to opening a commercial museum, Mr. Schwalb changed its name last fall. An investor suggested that a branding firm analyze the earlier name, the National Sports Museum.
“They felt ‘national’ sounded governmental,” Mr. Schwalb said, and “that ‘sports’ should be the first word and that ‘America’ should be part of it because we’re layered into the area with the Statue of Liberty and World Trade Center Memorial.”