Page 20 - BusinessWest August 19, 2024

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The Seuss Effect
Springfield Museums Ride Wave of
Momentum, Innovation, Entrepreneurship
BY GEORGE O’BRIEN
‘Bold.’
That’s the word Kay
Simpson used as she talked about the Springfield Muse- ums’ decision back in 2018
to acquire what she called a “somewhat blighted” property on Chestnut Street, adja- cent to its Wood Museum of Springfield His- tory, with the intention of repurposing it into something else.
The property wasn’t actually for sale, she said, but the Museums essentially made it for sale with an offer that ultimately wasn’t refused, with the intention of improving the landscape and creating a far more positive impression of the Quadrangle. And six years later — a timespan lengthened by COVID, rising construction prices, and other factors — that something else is turning into a nod to Dr. Seuss, or his grandparents, to be more precise.
“We’ve been using the experience of opening the Dr. Seuss museum and the kind of family engagement that it engendered, and spreading it out all over the Quadrangle.”
Indeed, Ted Geisel’s grandparents oper- ated a bakery on Howard Street, a site now part of the MGM Springfield footprint. The two former storefronts on Chestnut Street,
a liquor store and convenience store, will become a bakery and café, with the latter fea- turing plant-based foods (more on that later). The venue has been outfitted with a replica of the kind of delivery truck the children’s author’s grandparents might have used.
This latest initiative at the Museums is innovative, entrepreneurial, and, yes, bold, operating traits that have been inspired by, or amplified by, the runaway success that is the Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum, the importance of which to the Springfield Museums, from the bottom line to exposure nationally and globally, simply cannot be overstated, Simpson said.
“It’s been ... monumental,” she told Busi- nessWest, noting that, before the facility opened in 2017, the Museums had logged operating deficits for several years running.
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Kay Simpson, left, and Cynthia Campbell at the soon-to-open Chestnut Street Café and Bakery.