Cultural Gem May Leave Worcester for Chicopee, Massachusetts

The Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center Museum, housed in the renovated Union Station of Worcester, Massachusetts for the past three years, is making active plans to relocate, perhaps out of the city to Chicopee, Massachusetts. Featured in numerous national news stories during the past year, the FDR Center Museum contains the largest collection of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt historical materials outside of Hyde Park, New York, FDR's home and the first presidential library.

Worcester, MA (PRWEB) May 22, 2007 -- Founded as a museum of New Deal history in 2004, the FDR Center Museum has hosted major events in honor of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Greatest Generation, hosted dignitaries, and shared its large Roosevelt collection free of charge with school children, parents, college students, senior citizens and others.

The people of greater Worcester want this major cultural attraction in central Massachusetts to stay right where it is, but the City Manager's office has a different agenda. Without cause or notice, intending to convert a public transportation center restored by almost forty million dollars of public funds into a private office complex, Worcester city government has decided that this cultural gem must leave Union Station.

Further, the FDR Center Museum was given no advance notice of this unilateral decision on the part of Worcester City Manager Michael V. O'Brien. Into the cultural void stepped the Mayor of Chicopee, Michael D. Bissonnette, who has offered to move the second largest collection of New Deal memorabilia in the world west to the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, to the historic library building at Market Square in Chicopee.

Further, the President of Elms College, Dr. James H. Mullen, Jr., is also interested in establishing active connections with an FDR Center Museum reborn in the creation of a Roosevelt study institute at the college, which would be adjacent to the FDR Center Museum if it were to relocate to Chicopee.

As summarized in an editorial published on May 19, 2007 in The Republican, the largest daily newspaper in the region: "This would be a feather in Chicopee's cap, or, more appropriately, its gray felt Fedora hat, a favorite of the New Deal architect and one of the 10,000 FDR-related items in the museum collection."

When the Museum of Modern Art first opened at its current location in New York City, on May 10, 1939, President Roosevelt proclaimed by radio: "Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well."

FDR continued: "In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things we are furthering democracy itself. That is why this museum is a citadel of civilization."

The City of Worcester will in all probability lose one of its most precious and important cultural attractions during the past several years, but the FDR Center Museum will not only survive the present ordeal, but ultimately prosper, perhaps in Chicopee, Massachusetts. For full details on the FDR Center Museum please visit our website: http://www.fdrheritage.org or contact the museum's president and founder, Dr. Joseph J. Plaud at: (508) 579-0043.

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