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Grand Central Racket. Pass through New York's Grand Central Terminal this week and you may be surprised to see a 500-seat theater right smack in the middle of it, reports Dan Ackman in The Wall Street Journal. It's really more like a stadium, actually, where world-class squash players are competing to win the Bear Stearns Tournament of Champions, www.tocsquash.com. The big idea is to promote squash in America. Even though the sport is known for its "grace, quickness, accuracy and power," it pretty much falls flat on its face here in the U.S., where it receives "little or no television coverage ... and even the thickest sports section rarely finds room for it."
Indeed, of all the great players whacking that ball around Grand Central, not one of the 32 competitors is an American. Closest thing is a Canadian, Jonathon Power, www.jpsquash.com, who has won the championship four of the last six years, but owing to a recovering broken hand is not expected to do so well this time around. Why? Part of the explanation is that the squash has scant tradition in America. It's British, you know? Imported by the British Military, as the story goes. Exactly where the sport got started is a matter of debate, although The Story of Squash by Rex Bellamy places its origins "at Harrow, the elite boarding school." The other story is that squash was invented in London's Fleet Prison (Bellamy says that was not squash, but a predecessor game called rackets).
Wherever it came from, it hasn't gotten very far here. Some say that is because it is played mostly in private clubs, out of the public view. Most of the great players, meanwhile, "grew up on public courts" and "eschew college," turning "pro by their late teens." Few make much money at it: "Perhaps the top five earn six-figure incomes, including from sponsorships, according to Martin Bronstein, dean of the squash press, who writes for the website www.SquashTalk.com and other outlets." The hope is that staging this tourney in Grand Central (right across the street from the Yale Club), and exposing it to the "120,000 people who pass by the court on a typical weekday will generate wider interest in the game." Not everyone is totally convinced the idea is so good, though: "I'm of two minds," says one fan. "It gets people to see a bit of squash. On the other hand, to have a major championship in a train station -- it doesn't seem quite the place for it." Hm. Well, anyway, the tourney is sold out, and" at a top ticket price of $130."
The Barnes Bus. In Philadelphia there's a big fight happening over the fate of an art museum, and Peter Linett thinks the solution may be a bus. As Mr. Linett explains in a Wall Street Journal essay, those who think the only way to preserve the Barnes Foundation (home of 180 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 60 Matisses, dozens of Picassos and Modiglianis) is to move it from its current location in suburban Marion, Pa. to downtown Philadelphia, are missing a huge marketing opportunity (in addition to committing a huge "cultural crime"). "Picture it," he writes. "A rolling public-awareness vehicle, painted by an American artist ... that Philadelphians and tourists point out in the streets, and that guidebooks run in boldface in their pages on Philadelphia culture."
His idea, then, is to have two museums -- keeping the existing Barnes, www.barnesfoundation.org, where it is and opening an additional, new facility downtown, that would be home to works for which there is no room in Marion, as well as "classrooms, a lecture and performance hall, workspaces for conservators and galleries for ... lucractive temporary shows." The Barnes Bus would then shuttle tourists between the two museums, making the Barnes "as accessible, in the physical sense, as any cultural destination in central Philly and more accessible, in the social and intellectual sense, than perhaps any other great art museum in the nation."
Other museums have worked similar concepts, Mr. Linett notes, such as the "Tate to Tate" riverboat, " a sleek, 220-seat catamaran whose paint job and interiors were designed by ... Damien Hirst - now shuttling hip museumgoers from the Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain, www.tate.org.uk, to the thronged 'Weather Project' at the Tate Modern." He also cites, as models, the shuttle between D.C.'s National Air & Space Museum and its Dulles Airport annex, as well as current and pending museum shuttles in Pasadena, Cleveland and Chicago. Great idea, no? As Mr. Linett concludes: "If Albert Barnes were alive today, the only question is who he'd pick to paint the first bus."
Tim Manners, editor
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