Cool idea, but does it make sense to put a museum 70 miles outside NYC on the far end of Long Island? How are people going to get to this museum? It's not near anything.
I agree, let's move the building to Central Park! Will you start the Kickstarter campaign or shall I?
PS: Long Island is the most populated island in the US, it has 7.6 million inhabitants. Also, Brookhaven is in the middle of the island (close to Fire Island), not the far end. The Hamptons are way farther out, and yet plenty of people manage to find their way there.
When you exclude Brooklyn and Queens, which are ~70 miles away from this site, Long Island has only (7568304 - 2532645 - 2247848) = 2.8 million residents. And that 70 mile distance will be far enough out of the way to exclude most out-of-area tourists who are visiting NYC.
The site significance is cool, no doubt, but I question how many people will ever trek out to visit this.
Eh, 70 miles is still daily commuter distance; there are thousands and thousands of people who commute daily from 70+ miles away in Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Upstate to Manhattan.
A good science/history museum there would still be in range of the informed tourist (ie, those likely to spend a day at a Tesla museum) and more importantly of elementary school field trips. Personally I would pair it with the Teddy Roosevelt museum on Long Island and do a Turn-of-the-Century Internet Celebrity Day Trip.
Brookhaven is relatively close to Bellport LIRR (3 min drive). I could see them buying a van and hiring a driver to travel back and forth between the location and the station.
In any case, Dia: Beacon is one of the most famous galleries in the world, and it's 90 miles away from New York City. Lots of people commute from the city in the summer to check it out.
I am so glad I went to Dia:Beacon when I visited NYC. It was awesome, absolutely beautiful and literally a breath of fresh air. And I mean literally, I almost forgot what fresh air smelled like after a week in NYC :-P
It's Tesla's old laboratory, so it has something to do with Tesla, and isn't just a building. I'm sure people interested will go out of their way to get to this museum.
You know, that's the problem. They want Tesla's life and legacy to be known -- you don't do that in the middle of nowhere. Much as I would love to go visit this myself, it's dooming it to the geeks, largely.
It's not exactly in the middle of nowhere. It has Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory. It has half a dozen airports, more than 400K inhabitants, and it's the largest town (by area) in the entire state.
