New York City basically does one kind of museum well, the cultural museum. The Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim, the Frick, the Met, some paintings, some rocks and bones and a sculpture or too. Ancient or modern, it doesn’t really matter. The art’s the thing.

That hasn’t stopped various museum ventures, from the Museum of the American Indian and the Sports Museum of America at Bowling Green in the man with the hat and the tan island, are particular examples of pointless ventures that no one visits. After all who goes to New York to see sports memorabilia or Indian exhibits. Museums are geared mostly to the tourist trade with a sideline of people genuinely interested in the subject. The former aren’t visiting the city expecting to see Indian and Sports museums, the paying odds are that they’ve got better sports and Native American artifact and culture museums back in the Midwest. And New York isn’t about to produce a museum impressive enough for people genuinely interested in sports or Native American culture.

Which makes the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame museum annex in New York City twice as pointless. Something like that is obviously meant to cash in on the tourist trade, just like Madame Tussaud’s, but it takes a pretty bored or aimless tourist to wander in to something as off the mark as that. I’m sure Madame Tussaud gets its traffic, but at least it has a certain wacky uniqueness that blends into New York. The Rock and Hall of Fame annex may try to focus on Springsteen for the Bridge and Tunnel crowd, but they’ve got the Stone Pony already and they aren’t coming into the city for that. The thing is that New York’s rock and roll legacy is too much a part of a whole other era, one that doesn’t fit nearly into the museum’s agenda, it’s a New York music legacy that flows out of Jazz and after it into its aftermath.