When is a "Donation" No Longer a Donation?

Gowanus Lounge attended the Park Slope Designer Market at the Old Stone House in J.J. Byrne Park on Saturday. It presented a nice assortment of clothes and accessories created by local designers. The little scene we witnessed at the front desk, though, has had us scratching our heads ever since. We've hestitated even getting into this, because we like the Old Stone House and its director and admire its role in the community, but we helped promote the show...so, here goes:

We arrived around 4 o'clock and noticed that the person at the desk was requesting a "three dollar suggested donation" for admission. (Which is no doubt standard for the facility.) Interesting, in this case, because the show was specifically promoted as being free. In any case, like we said, we like the Old Stone House and didn't have a problem with the three dollars, even though we were on our way to Sunset Park and to Bay Ridge and were only planning to stay for a few minutes. What's three bucks, right? As we entered, we heard the person at the front desk ask a young woman who was clearly under the age of eighteen to see her student ID when she said "I'm a student," in response to the request for "a donation." The young woman looked surprised, but coughed up her student ID.

We looked around the show, and were on our way out when we heard an ugly exchange between the Old Stone House person and two visitors who said they were surprised they'd have to pay admission. They didn't want to see the museum, they said, only the design show. As they continued to balk, they recieved a stern lecture (this is a kind description of the tone we heard) about how "this is our suggested donation" and how "the donation supports the museum and programming at the Old Stone House."

"But we only want to come to the design show," one of the visitors said.

"It's in the Old Stone House and three dollars is our suggested donation," the worker said.

We didn't want to get into the dispute, so we stayed out of it and didn't point out how the promotional material said the show was free. ("Free show," to us, doesn't mean the show is free, but the venue charges you.) Make a long story short, one of the visitors told the worker she could be nicer about it. The worker said the visitors (who were being quite nice) were being nasty "so we're even."

The two visitors left without ever going in, one of them saying, "I don't want to support this place."

So, here's the point of all this: If a donation is an admission price, why hew to this fiction that it's a donation? We understand that we live in an era in which the public sector shortchanges cultural institutions and that our parks are, almost literally, being sold to the highest bidder and that everyone from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on down does it, but why engage in double speak? If you demand it--and do so stridenly--it is only a donation in the sense that a mugger would call the money you give up a "donation"

More to the point, while the likely villain is probably a miscommunication somewhere along the line, is the few hundred dollars the Old Stone House collected on Saturday worth the ill will it generated among people that might have been badly treated by niceness-challenged person who was at the desk in late afternoon? (There are nice ways to tell people to pay up, and there are less nice ways. We only heard less nice ways.)

Again, we like the Old Stone House. It hosts wonderful community events. So does J.J. Byrne Park. We attended the Brooklyn Blogfest there and it was great. We feel awful just pointing this out. But, we feel even worse that we helped promote the designer's show and that some people were taken by surprise by the "donation" and that those that didn't want to "donate"--for whatever reason...cheapness, lack of cash, lack of civic mindedness, whatever--were turned away or, worse, treated badly by the staff.

Yes, this is a dumb little thing, but it's been irritating us ever since we listened to the exchange. We're sorry to the Old Stone House for pointing it out. We're sorry to the people that worked hard to organize the design show. We're sorry to the people who attended and had issues with the admission price.