Who rearranged the furniture?
As the entry door swings closed behind them, visitors to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum immediately turn their gaze – through a picture window – into the Plaque Gallery.
It’s the altar of the cathedral of baseball, where the bronze plaques adorn the oak walls. And without even being able to read the individual plaques from that distance, the fans know they are looking at the shrine of the game.
The Plaque Gallery remains the center of the Hall of Fame experience. But it is not a static exhibit. The regular addition of new members changes the look of the Gallery.
The spring of 2013, however, featured a major transformation with the re-ordering of the plaques of the most recent electees. For Hall of Fame supporters, it will provide the answer to one of their favorite questions about the Museum: “What will you do when you run out of space for the plaques?”
The Plaque Gallery as it now stands opened in 1958 and has featured several layouts of the plaques – which numbered fewer than 100 into the early 1960s. The plaques were eventually mounted on the oak walls running in the now-familiar pattern along the outside frame of the Gallery space.
But following a major renovation of the Gallery and plaque refurbishment in the 1980s, the plaques were re-ordered in nearly the way they are today – with the earliest Hall of Fame classes starting on the right side (as you look into the Gallery) and moving forward in time, then returning to the front of the Gallery to head up the left side chronologically. At the time, this left about a decade of plaque space.
“During (1985 and 1986), we had all the plaques down,” said Ted Spencer, the Museum’s former Chief Curator. “And when we reinstalled them, we moved them slightly closer to each other so we gained about 10 more spaces.”
But with the election of the seven-person Class of 1999, the final left-side alcove was filled to capacity and beyond. The Museum curatorial team, however, had anticipated this and enacted a plan to turn the Gallery rotunda – enclosed in 1993 and used after that for short-term exhibits – into more plaque space.
At this point, the Museum was already planning the $20 million renovation that would be completed in 2005. The addition of the picture window from the entrance to the Gallery would mean visitors would see the rotunda upon entry, so the plan was advanced to move the Class of 1936 plaques – Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner – to the center of the rotunda.
The image of the inaugural class would then greet Museum visitors as they entered the Hall of Fame.
However, this still left the question of how to order the plaques in the rotunda. To present the best symmetry possible, the decision was made to alternate years on either side of the inaugural class – with odd-year classes on the left and even-year classed on the right, fanning out from the Class of 1936.
But with the election of 18 candidates in the Class of 2006 – the largest single class in Hall of Fame history – that symmetry was lost, creating one side of the wall with many more plaques than the other. This large class, however, made the chronological hanging of plaques from left to right aesthetically possible.
Following this most recent re-ordering, space is present for about 12 to 15 years of new classes before the space question again becomes acute.
Despite the periodic changes, the Hall of Fame Plaque Gallery remains one of the iconic venues in all of sport and throughout the country. With more than five decades of history, the Gallery connects generations as grandparents, parents and children can share their stories of their memories of baseball’s sacred ground.
The majestic ceilings, the natural lighting and the exclusivity – no other artifacts are found in the Gallery beyond the plaques – give the Plaque Gallery a unique feeling all its own, different from any other location in the Museum.
Erik Strohl is the vice president of exhibitions and collections at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
