The New Treasure Island Museum
Treasure Island is a special place whose rich history resonates in the present and inspires the future. The island’s latest reinvention is now underway, creating San Francisco’s newest neighborhood, a destination for local and international visitors, and a world model for sustainable urban living.
The Board members of the Treasure Island Museum and many of our supporters have formed deep ties to the island and its heritage. Working with an international museum design firm, we have created a vision for a new museum that will invite visitors
and residents to share our understanding and connections with
the island, and develop their own.
Visitors will enter through a proposed entrance from the new
Building One plaza opposite the ferry landing and transportation
center. A space of 3,500 to 4,000 square feet has been allocated
on the ground floor adjacent to the lobby.
The new museum will engage visitors with three theaters of varying sizes and types, presenting different aspects of the island’s stories. The largest, the Connections Theater, on the left in this drawing, will be reconfigurable as an auditorium for lectures, presentations, community meetings and event rentals.
In the center of the core area, guests will use the interactive map to dive deeper into whatever interests them about the island’s past, present and future.
The story wall at the back of this area will link the themes of island’s history with its impact and relevance to concerns of today.
To engage visitor, particularly families, and create new memories, the museum will offer two immersive virtual reality experiences. In the Pan Am Clipper experience, they will sit in a Pan Am Clipper cabin and look out the window as the plane taxis away from the island, takes off, flies over the Golden Gate International Exposition and the new Golden Gate Bridge, and heads out toward Honolulu.
In the Bay Bridge Cable Walk experience, guests will walk out on a cable of the newly built Bay Bridge, with Treasure Island and the fair in the background. Eventually, different video projections could transport visitors back to when the bridge was just a cable in mid-air or into a future with the new island fully built out.
The vision for the new Treasure Island Museum will evolve as the design process unfolds and the campaign to fund its construction moves forward. With your support, the Board looks forward to the day when we can welcome you to the new museum.