Port to end pact with maritime museum

SEATAC -- It looks as if Seattle's waterfront maritime museum could share the fate of the doomed Titanic.

The Port of Seattle Commission voted Tuesday to terminate its agreement with the troubled Odyssey, Maritime Discovery Center when the center's lease expires at the end of the year.

The center opened its nonprofit maritime museum in 1998 at Pier 66, but it has consistently fallen short of attendance and revenue projections. The port, the center's landlord, has forgiven lease payments owed by the museum and in 2005 approved a takeover of museum operations by Columbia Hospitality, a for-profit venture that operates the adjoining port-owned Bell Harbor International Conference Center and sometimes rents out the museum for weddings, banquets and other events.

Columbia Hospitality will continue to manage the museum until the end of the year.

The port plans to seek bids this summer from potential future tenants of the current museum space, which could be put to any use the commission approves.

In a touch of irony, the commission paid tribute at the beginning of its meeting to Marc Hershman, the driving force behind the museum, who died Feb. 17.

And several residents urged the commission to maintain the space as a museum to educate the public about the importance of the maritime industry.

"The closing of Odyssey would be a great loss to our community, and it would be gone forever," Gary Stauffer of the Youth Maritime Training Association told the commission.