When Mike Gibbons was looking to steal ideas for his new venue, Sports Legends at Camden Yards, he didn't visit only museums that celebrated athletics.
Sure, he went to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., the basketball hall in Springfield, Mass., and the Kentucky Derby museum at Churchill Downs in Louisville. But he also drove down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to study the Holocaust and Spy museums in Washington. He went to a number of Civil War museums.
"Our goal is that we are trying to build America's top sports museum," Gibbons said, which meant finding ways to try to set it apart.
In a few days, Gibbons should get a sense of how successful he's been. Contractors are scurrying to complete the exhibits -- Gibbons calls them sets -- for the $16 million project's May 14 opening day. Saturday's Preakness Parade will end at the museum's front doors, and dignitaries will cut the ribbon on the 22,000-square-foot facility, housed in historic Camden Station.
Sports Legends has been a dream of Gibbons' since 1983, when he became executive director of the Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum, located in an Emory Street rowhouse a few blocks away.
The museum got the rights to develop the nearly 150-year-old station, which is owned by the Maryland Stadium Authority, in 1995. But various difficulties stalled the project until 2002. The stadium authority is financing the reconstruction of the station, at a cost of $8.5 million. Gibbons has raised about $6.5 million from private donations -- including $1 million from Orioles owner Peter Angelos -- but still needs to raise another $1 million.
Sports Legends will occupy the basement and first floor of the old train station. The stadium authority is seeking a compatible tenant for the top two floors.
Gibbons thinks it was worth the wait.
"We have a great location, we have a great building, and we have Johnny Unitas and Babe Ruth and Cal Ripken and Ray Lewis," he said. "That ain't bad."
First exhibit on women
Visitors will enter the museum's lobby and buy their tickets at an old-style train station ticket window. They will then board a replica of a B&O Railroad car -- painted in the B&O's colors of blue and light green -- that will seem to rumble as scenery passes by the windows.
Camden Station is the second-oldest train station still standing in the United States (the oldest is in Ellicott City). In addition to celebrating Maryland's sports history, Gibbons said, the museum honors its building's rail heritage.
"One of our missions is to let this building speak to its history," he said.
The first exhibit is a temporary one and will honor Maryland women in sports. It will be narrated by University of Maryland alumna Bonnie Bernstein of CBS Sports and will feature displays on, among others, Terps athletic director Debbie Yow and 1976 Olympic gold-medal figure skater Dorothy Hamill, a Baltimore resident.
From there, visitors will go on to the permanent exhibits. The first celebrates Baltimore-born Ruth and will have artifacts such as the extra-large kimono that was presented to him when he visited Japan in 1934.
The next area is "nine innings of Orioles baseball," and takes visitors from the team's beginnings, through old Oriole Park (which will appear to burn down in the museum the same way it burned down in 1944), through the Memorial Stadium years and to the present.
Displays will include Brooks Robinson's locker from Memorial Stadium, the "2131" banners that hung on the old B&O warehouse when Ripken surpassed Lou Gehrig's consecutive-games streak, and the plastic champagne glasses that Ripken and his wife drank milk from to celebrate the shortstop's 1991 American League MVP award.
"One of the things that we think is very important for our museum -- or any museum -- is to bring real stuff to the public," Gibbons said.
"We realize that one of our primary markets here is youngsters," he said. "We've got to please them, or this ain't going to happen correctly. We want to wow and dazzle them as much as we can."
Negro Leagues history
The tour then moves to the building's basement, which had dirt floors and low ceilings when museum construction began. Some 22 inches of dirt had to be dug out by hand and carried out of the station to lower the floor enough to allow patrons to walk through.
The first exhibit in the basement celebrates Baltimore's Negro Leagues history, with a re-creation of the hotel room that the late Sam Lacy, a sportswriter with Baltimore's Afro-American newspaper, shared with Jackie Robinson when Robinson broke the major league color barrier in 1947. There's also a streetscape from Pennsylvania and North avenues from the 1930s and 1940s showing the importance of baseball to black culture at the time.
After exhibits featuring minor league and amateur baseball, the state's other sports get their due.
