-- The well-worn Fender guitar (Esquire neck, Telecaster body) he was wearing on the cover of the best rock album ever made, Born to Run, and used on numerous other recordings, as well as in this year's Super Bowl halftime show. He bought it at a music store in 1972 for $180.

-- The clothes he wore on the cover of Born in the U.S.A.

-- The sax Clarence Clemons played during his epic Jungleland solo.

-- The 1960 Corvette that Springsteen bought after Born to Run put him on the covers of Time and Newsweek the same week in 1975. (Very cool. Black convertible with white sides. Still has only 36,877.1 miles on it — not that I looked very closely. . . .)

Even better than the shiny artifacts are the displays that shed light on the creative process. Check out the early mockups of the Born to Run cover, some of them radically different from the final choice.

We can even look over Springsteen's shoulder as he composes his most famous lyrics. This man writes, rewrites and then rewrites some more. Hammering out the final lyrics for the Born to Run album ate up 50 pages of his notebook. (One of the last trims in the title track: ''Your young and cold all dressed in violence/ With a silence in your soul.'')

Additional insight is offered by a lengthy, continuously playing video of ''The Boss'' explaining his writing process and goals. One day last week, a man and woman from Chicago were absolutely riveted to the screen, despite a group of ill-mannered schoolchildren who were treating the museum as a glorified playground.

Dale Rose, 55, and wife Carol were on vacation. Visiting the rock hall wasn't the only reason the couple headed east, Rose said, but it was the primary impetus.

''It's a very, very interesting experience seeing all this information from the musical era you grew up in,'' he said.

Vacationing in Cleveland. What a concept.

Hey, if New York plays its cards right, maybe in a few more years, it will get some of this memorabilia and become a tourist destination itself.