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Johns Hopkins University to pay $373M for Washington DC’s Newseum
The building spans 632K sf across from the National Mall
The owners of the Newseum in Washington D.C. have agreed to sell the Pennsylvania Avenue building for $372.5 million.
The nonprofit group Freedom Forum announced Friday that Johns Hopkins University will buy the building, according to the New York Post. The school will consolidate its Washington-based programs there.
The decision to sell the museum — focused on journalism, the history of communication and First Amendment issues — was made after more than a year-long review of its operations, including its “unsustainable” operating costs, according to the Post.
The 10-year-old 632,000-square-foot building is located at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the National Mall and near the U.S. Capitol Building. There are 15 theaters, a dozen large galleries, and 75,000 square feet of office space. The building also includes a residential component with 135 rentals.
The museum will stay open through the end of 2019, but its long-term fate is up in the air. The Freedom Forum appears not to have a new space for the museum lined up and said in a statement it was exploring “digital outreach, traveling exhibits, and web-based programs in schools around the world, as well as hopefully in a new physical home in the area.”
The Newseum has permanent exhibits on news coverage of the September 11th terror attacks, a comprehensive gallery of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, and it regularly hosts talks with well-known journalists. It also has a number of historical artifacts, including the Montana cabin from which the Unabomber ran his mail-bombing campaign. [NYP] – Dennis Lynch