Tesla Center receives $500k from NYS parks for restoration

The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe has been awarded $500,000 from New York State Parks to support the restoration of Nikola Tesla’s laboratory in Shoreham. This funding will be used as a match for a federal grant from the National Parks Service. Both grants are earmarked for historic preservation and will be used to rebuild the lab building, which was damaged in a fire in November of 2023, just as construction began. 

“The entirety of the project was [estimated at] $20 million when we first started,” said Marc Alessi, executive director of the Tesla Science Center. “We had about 14 million raised prior to the fire. So getting this funding is important as we are getting back to our capital campaign, looking to finish it so that we can not only fix what’s happened with the fire, but actually move forward and finish the project.”

The goal of the New York State historic preservation program is “to improve, protect, preserve, rehabilitate, restore or acquire properties listed on the State or National Registers of Historic Places and for structural assessments and/or planning for such projects.” The Wardenclyffe property was added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 27, 2018. 

Private donations continue to be crucial to the project. These government grants are reimbursement grants, meaning the Tesla Science Center still needs to raise their own money before the state and federal funding kicks in. “We still have to raise private donations. The way government grants work, they are reimbursement grants. So it’s great that you raise about half of the money from these government grants. But we still have to continue raising private foundation money. We have to match this funding from the private sector as well, and that’s what we’re focused on right now,” Mr. Alessi said.

Nikola Tesla came to America from what is now Croatia with a drive to invent. Among his many innovations were the alternate current power system, fluorescent lighting, and the remote control. “Tesla was a futurist, and even back in 1904 he was predicting things like the smartphone … In his time, people thought he was crazy, but he could just see where things were going,” said Mr. Alessi. “People will get a sense of the history [through the site], but kids will also get access to groundbreaking and global level STEM programming, which is extremely important, especially in a place like Long Island where innovation is a big part of our economy.”

The Tesla Center is gearing up for their 2025 fundraising, which will include another metal recycling event in partnership with Gershow recycling and the Tesla Birthday Expo. The fire has been a setback for the restoration, but Mr. Alessi remains hopeful the project will be a success. “We’re looking to remobilize this spring. Because of the fire, it’s going to extend the timeline. We’re probably going to be opening our first building, which is not the lab building, later this year. The lab building itself, as a result of the fire, most likely won’t open until 2028.”