The $40 million International Spy Museum that Kathleen Coakley
designed in Washington, D.C., has drawn roughly one million
tourists since opening in July 2002. Located near the nation's
greatest public (and free) museums, it is
already ahead of its five-year business plan to become self-sustaining.
Coakley is vice president of exhibition
development for the Malrite Corporation of Cleveland, created
by communications magnate Milton Maltz to build on lessons
learned from his involvement in the launch of the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame. Coakley made her mark in Cleveland in 1985
when she founded the Committee for Public Art to put sculpture
in the city's public spaces. An art major in college,
she'd worked in the education department of the Cleveland
Museum of Art.
Coakley designed the spy museum for "the
James Bond in all of us." There's a Soviet coat
button camera; a nose mold from a CIA disguise kit; a piece
of the American Embassy in Moscow "just rife with bugs"--but
there are relatively few weapons. "If you get to the
point where you need the lipstick gun, your intelligence gathering
has failed," she says. Exhibiting the tools of spycraft
posed unique challenges. Says Coakley, "Most of this
stuff was meant to not call attention. An Enigma machine"--the
infamous German World War II encrypter--"looks
like an old adding machine." And so the museum offers
an abundance of interactive stations, from eavesdropping posts
to computer screens "where you get to zoom in on a Chinese
airbase like you're the satellite."
Coakley would make a good spy. She has
a sharp eye, braking several times on a walk through the museum
to scoop a receipt or a ticket stub from the floor. She'll
see a mission through to completion, and describes how she
once climbed over one of the museum's glass barriers,
intent on cleaning the windshield of the James Bond Aston
Martin from Goldfinger (she discovered not dust but
dings, accumulated in chase scenes). And she is intrepid:
When a band of teenage boys escapes from the tourist track
into the museum's back hall, she single-handedly marches
them back.
Coakley says she and her colleagues are
now contemplating their next concept museum--maybe in
Washington or Boston--"but if I told you more,
I'd have to kill you."
Anna Marie Murphy
Photo: Kathleen Hickey Coakley NC'72. By Gary Wayne Gilbert
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