Once the project is complete, the museum will be able to remain open even while shows are changed.
Now that huge amounts of information can be delivered to hand-held wireless devices, the museum will be able to do so at many levels of sophistication.
Visitors to the museum will be able to watch the construction work from a loft in the main shipyard building where there will be an exhibition about the Roann and eastern-rig trawlers.
Mr. di Marco says that the Florentine museum will be able to display the brand's rich archive of vintage items that have never been on public view before.
Now doubled in size, the museum will be able to display many of the 5,000 Picasso drawings, sculptures, photographs and archive material that were previously hidden from public view.
"It's always an issue when you relocate, but the museum will be able to do so much more," said Cristyne F. Lategano-Nicholas, who is Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's nonvoting representative on the museum's board of trustees and is the president of NYC & Company, the city's convention and visitors bureau.
The Hartford Club, whose membership has dropped from 1300 to 800 since 1998, will move to a new downtown site better suited for its current membership, and the museum will be able to expand to a building only 100 yards from its existing location on Prospect Street.
And so – alongside John Lennon's guitar, Clarence Clemons's saxophone, Elvis's custom motorcycle and Joey Ramone's leather jacket – visitors to the museum will be able to see a painted oil drum, one of 15,000 or so that are placed round the site to collect the refuse discarded by the revellers – of whom there will be 177,000 this year.
Now, at last, the museum will be able to embrace its greatest challenge: combining works by 18th- and 19th-century folk artists with those by 20th-century self-taught and Outsider artists to see if they really do reflect a distinctive American sense of free expression.
Visitors to the museum will be able to have rides aboard the trolleybus after its "unveiling" to the public at the beginning of May.
