A 1941 Chrysler Thunderbolt owned by the LeMay Museum in Tacoma, Wash., was on display at the New York International Auto Show. At left, a 1943 Studebaker Commander Land Cruise Sedan, also from the LeMay Museum.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

NEW YORK When it is finished in 2012, the Harold LeMay Auto Museum in Tacoma, Wash., will be the largest auto museum in the world by far.

But that’s not all. Plans call for the $100-million-plus project to be a major tourist destination, with changing exhibits, regular rallies and shows on a 3 1/2-acre park, activities for families, including a possible drive-in movie theater and a retail complex.

“We want to create a fun place,” said David Madeira, LeMay’s president and CEO.

The museum has also developed links with major car clubs in such places as Kirkwood, Wash., and Colorado Springs which sponsor Concours d’Elegance.

“Anyone can line up 100 cars behind a rope,” said Dominic Dobson, LeMay’s chief advancement officer, at the New York International Auto Show last week. The museum was displaying a number of vintage cars as part of a promotional drive.

“That may be good for car nuts, but your grandmother is not going to be interested,” he said.

“People come once and then don’t come any more, except maybe to bring visitors from out of town,” said Madeira of the static exhibits at many car museums. “It’s the same old thing.”

The core of the LeMay Auto Museum will be a collection of about 1,200 vehicles — 400 on display and the rest in a storage garage at any one time — housed in an avant-garde building of 400,000 square feet. Members will also be able to store their cars in a separate area and visitors will be able to visit many of the stored vehicles.

That’s more than double the number of cars and square footage at the world’s largest auto museums — the Musée Nationale de l’Automobile in Mulhouse, France, which has about 450 old cars, including 122 Bugattis, and the Sinsheim Auto & Technik Museum in Sinsheim, Germany, which has about 300 vintage cars.

“No other museum comes close,” said Dobson. He said 400 of the vehicles, which are predominantly American are currently housed on an 85-acre estate called Marymount, with another 400 at the five-acre family estate and the rest “warehoused around the state.”

Marymount is open to guided tours while the family estate is open but once a year, he said.

The LeMay collection is based on the collection amassed by Harold LeMay, who made a fortune in trash collecting in Pierce County, Wash., which is home to the Mount Rainier volcano, and had the collecting bug bad, according to Dobson. When he died in 2000, his collection totaled almost 3,500 vehicles. Dobson said LeMay was concerned about his collection being broken up after his death and laid the groundwork for a museum back in 1998. He said LeMay was particularly aware of the example of casino and hotel magnate Bill Harrah, who also had a large car collection when he died in 1978 and parts were sold off.

Indeed, Dobson said LeMay purchased a number of vehicles from Harrah’s estate. At the same time, enough cars remained to create the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nev., which has a collection of about 200 cars.

Madeira, who had a background in fundraising, joined LeMay in 2002 after reading about the plans to build a museum.

“I was flying out of Boston and it said Harold had about 3,000 cars,” he said. “That caught my attention.”

“I didn’t know anything about car museums,” he added. Madeira, a native Rhode Islander who grew up in Barrington, said he flew out and offered to work on the project – after convincing his wife that Puget Sound was very much like Narragansett Bay, even though it’s not.

LeMay’s widow, Nancy, was committed to carrying out her husband’s dream. In developing a vision of the future museum. Madeira said he and his team visited such tourist destination icons as EPCOT theme park at Disney World and Universal Studios, both in Orlando, Fla.

The museum has since winnowed down the collection to less than 2,000 cars — many of the vehicles had been purchased in job lots and were not museum quality.

The collection was started some 40 years ago. The earliest car is a replica of an 1893 Mercedes, with the earliest American car an 1898 Maxwell and is strong through the American muscle cars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Madeira said.

Madeira organized the first fundraiser in 2003. He said that when he joined the museum, it had $30,000 in the bank. “Now we have $50 million,” he said.

He said the land had been donated by the city of Tacoma and the board had recently given the go ahead to break ground for the first stage this summer. Stage 1, which is largely the main showroom, is expected to be complete by 2010, with Stage 2 scheduled for completion in 2012.

Plans call for some 500,000 visitors a year, but Madeira said he is confident that the museum should attract “way more than that.”

Among the displays at the New York Auto Show was an enormous blue 1934 Studebaker Commander Land Cruise Sedan.

“When they built these cars no one was concerned about fuel economy,” Dobson said.

There was also a 2008 Honda Indy car 2008, a 24-hours Pontiac Grand Prix, and a 1927 Chevrolet LaSalle — one of famed designer Harley Earl’s first projects at General Motors — a 1941 Chrysler Lebaron Thunderbolt concept car and a dark turquoise 1936 Hudson Custom Eight convertible with an art deco hood ornament in the form of a red comet with wings.

It was also displaying the Fred Flintstone car from the 1994 movie, which Dobson said was basically a golf cart with the fiberglass structure of the prehistoric jalopy on top.

“It’s the sort of car that looks good after a couple of drinks,” he said of collectors who might make rash bids while feeling happy with the world. “But next morning you ask yourself what are you going to do with it.”

At the same time, he said, it had proved to be a great attention grabber ever since it had been donated to the museum by a member.

“Everyone wants to be photographed in it,” he said.

For more information, go to www.lemaymuseum.org/.

You can see aslideshowandmultimediapresentationoftheLeMayMuseum’sexhibitattheNewYorkInternationalAutoShowat projocars.com

pelsworth@projo.com