A little more than a year ago, award-winning Port Elizabeth architect Tim Hewitt-Coleman wrote about a conversation between him and his grown son, Litha, discussing the state of the Red Location Museum and what could be done to get it opened.
This was on the back of yet another article by this newspaper highlighting the deterioration of the acclaimed museum, described on Nelson Mandela Bay municipality’s website as “a beacon in the middle of a destitute mass of brightly coloured small houses”.
Comparing the museum to others like it around the world — the Holocaust one in Berlin and Washington’s Vietnam War Memorial — he wrote that those were built after the Holocaust and Vietnam War were over.
“I’m beginning to think the real problem is that Red Location Museum was way ahead of its time,” he wrote.
“But not in a good way.
“Perhaps the people struggling in desperate poverty to this day in Red Location and hundreds of other places like it may say that it is even now, 25 years after 1994, still too soon to celebrate or to memorialise victory.”
The museum has been closed since October 2013, due to housing issues in nearby streets.
It is a problem that has besieged the facility ever since and that has resulted in another set of problems — including large-scale looting as the building stands empty.
Most recently, last week, a fire gutted the floor and scorched the rusted walls of a replica corrugated iron shack inside.
It is believed thieves, thugs, burning the copper so it could be removed from the walls, caused the fire.
A year has passed since Hewitt-Coleman penned his thoughts — and the museum has continued moving further and further from being a beacon in New Brighton.
The situation now begs the question — was he right?
Was Red Location a museum ahead of its time?
More importantly, is it time we cut our losses for now and revisit the idea of a museum here once residents feel they truly have something to celebrate?
Or is the resolution, taken following a meeting between officials and residents on Tuesday, a step in the right direction for the future of our iconic museum?