Citizen Staff Writer
TEYA VITU
tvitu@tucsoncitizen.com
New paint and decorative banners are giving the finishing touches to a yearlong effort to spruce up the 1901 classical revival Carnegie Library building at 200 S. Sixth Ave.
The Tucson Children’s Museum and city Parks & Recreation Department are collaborating to improve the looks of the historic building that had been largely obscured by a block wall since 1960.
“The goal is to bring new life to the Carnegie,” said Michael Luria, interim executive director at the children’s museum, which occupies the former library building. “Once the wall came down you could see all the peeling paint.”
Parks & Recreation, which owns the building, tore down the wall in front of the Carnegie from April to June 2008 and replaced it with a wrought-iron fence to reveal the colonnaded structure to people at Armory Park and those walking down Sixth Avenue.
Parks & Recreation last week and this week is repainting the facade using about $5,000 that was left over from the $233,200 1997 Pima County Capital Improvement Project bond used to remove the wall and build the fence, said Howard Dutt, landscape architect at Parks & Recreation
The children’s museum will drape two banners on each of the five street light poles on Sixth Avenue and the seven light poles on Scott Avenue. Each banner will display images of children who use the museum, Luria said.
He expects the Sixth Avenue banners to get installed in early May and the Scott banners to be up by the end of May. Private funding is paying for the banners, he said.
The Scott banners will go up just as the streetscape project finishes to bring wider sidewalks, more trees and shrubs and benches to Scott Avenue from Broadway to the Temple of Music and Art.
Carnegie Library building housing Tucson Children’s Museum gets facelift