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treet vendors and museum goers are concerned about the closure of the Jakarta History Museum for two years of much-needed renovations.

Irfan Diansyah, a visitor from East Jakarta, cautioned the museum’s managers from overdoing the renovations.

“If they choose to repair the building then it’s a good thing. However they should be careful not to cause the museum lose its original character,” he said.

Duta, a visitor from Bogor who said she was a regular visitor to the museum, said that two years was far too long to wait. “I think two to three months would be more ideal,” she told The Jakarta Post.

Hamim, who said he regularly took his wife and two sons to the museum, said its closure meant that the city’s children would be deprived of an important history lesson.

“This is a cheap holiday destination that is full of knowledge that’s well-suited to children,” he said.

He said that museum could remain open during renovations if the process was done section by section.

“When one part of the museum is being renovated, other parts could be left open for visitors, like they do in shopping malls. That way everything could go on as normal,” he said.

The management of the Jakarta History Museum, better known as the Fatahillah Museum, announced last week that the venerable institution would be closed for renovations for two years starting in 2012.

Museum manager Enny Prihatin said many parts of the Fatahillah were in poor condition and in need of urgent renovation, including its walls, floors and windows.

The renovation project was announced after the Jakarta government and the Dutch Embassy completed an assessment of the Fatahillah’s condition which determined, among other things, that much of the museum’s wooden structure had started to deteriorate.

Dutch colonists built the museum in 1707 as their administrative center. In 1972, Ali Sadikin, then Jakarta governor, turned the building into a museum showcasing artifacts related to the city’s history.

Those likely to be hardest hit by the closure are the people who work in Fatahillah Square in front of the museum — an area teeming with food stalls, vendors renting old-fashioned bicycles, street entertainers, fortune tellers and tattoo artists, among others.

One artist working near the museum, Chandut, said the closure would deal a financial blow to him and his fellow street vendors. “Of course it will be a huge loss to us. This is our only source of income.”

Chandut asked the museum to consider the fate of local vendors before closing for two years.

A spokesman for the Friends of the Museum society proposed a win-win solution. “The exhibition can be taken outdoors. Guides can continue to tell stories about the history of Jakarta right outside of the museum,“ Friends of the Museum society chief Ade Purnama said.

He said that a two-year closure was normal for such a major renovation project and that the museum’s management needed to share more information about the planned closure.

“The public would understand if they were informed about the plan months before the project starts, perhaps through newspapers, magazines or electronic media,” he said. (awd)