Hundreds of people gathered on July 30 for a groundbreaking celebration at the site where the new Nordic Heritage Museum will one day be constructed.

Spectators consumed aquavit and feasted on salmon lox, Nordic flags flew, and skål songs were sung in honor of the new museum construction.

Mayor Ed Murray and Sen. Reuven Carlyle joined Nordic Heritage Museum Board of Trustees President, Irma Goertzen and CEO, Eric Nelson, as speakers in the ceremony. Dignitaries from Scandinavian countries including Finland, Norway, Sweden and Iceland joined trustees in breaking ground with gold-painted shovels.

“This is a very important step for us. … It’s really a question of survival. We need to move and this was the natural space for us to move to. It provides much better visibility and a great opportunity to modernize our facility,” said Nelson.

The new museum is the culmination of years of planning. The new 57,875 square-foot facility will be constructed at 2655 N.W. Market St., where Fenpro Studios used to reside. Demolition for the building was scheduled for last Monday.

NHM started acquiring property on the N.W. Market Street back in 2003, knowing back then that they would potentially have to move. They have been leasing their current space on Sunset Hill for the last 40 years. The building was once an elementary school. Now Seattle School District has plans to refurbish the building and reopen it as a school in order to meet the growing student demand.

“One of the main reasons I came up to take this position was to help guide the organization to the new home so this is a great sense of accomplishment for me to be this far in that process. It's a wonderful time and a great thing to celebrate.”

Mayor Murray compared the new museum to the Japanese Garden at the Washington Park Arboretum.

“The museum represents what Seattle is about. … It (Japanese Garden) represents a strain of important history in Seattle, the contribution of the Japanese-American community to this city, as well as a healing of wounds, and this museum represents the hard work of immigrants from Scandinavian countries that made this city possible and gave us a great gift in our progressive politics,” said Mayor Murray.

“There is so much humility and respect and dignity that we honor on this day from our State’s history of immigration from the Nordic community, and its such a blessing on this day,” said Sen. Carlyle.

“I hope you will allow me as an American Jew to have the personal privilege of expressing my gratitude to the people of Denmark, the people of Finland, the people the Iceland, the people of Norway and Sweden who were so profoundly different in their behavior that we call them, in my community, the righteous among the nations, and it is such an honor to celebrate the cultural heritage where a collective social fabric of nations made a moral choice to stand for those who had no voice.”

According to NHM, the facility will have larger exhibition areas and educational spaces. Nelson said that the new facility would be able to accommodate “world-class” exhibitions that the museum cannot currently host because of structural, security and environmental concerns. Along with core exhibits, the museum is designed with an auditorium, a café, classrooms, museum store and a cultural resource center.

The museum is still needs to raise funds for the $47 million project and opened a public fundraiser the day of the ceremony.

For more info visit https://nordicmuseum.or.