The Snohomish Carnegie Foundation’s business plan to renovate our historic building for educational activities is the best we may expect from an organization working with one hand tied behind its back.
And it’s tied with a double knot, no less.
The first limitation is the intention to sell half of the historic site. One of the architectural firms interviewed by the Carnegie Preservation Committee for a feasibility study in 2004 proposed to study various options for the historic site that included taking advantage of alterations created by the 1968 addition, as well as separating it in order to restore the building to its stand-alone, pre-1968 state. This idea to do a broad feasibility study was dismissed out of hand by former Mayor Liz Loomis at a public workshop with the City Council on Aug. 3, 2004. We couldn’t do that, she stated, because we need to sell the addition in order to pay for the renovation.
The addition is currently home to Arts of Snohomish, a co-op art gallery. Close to half the citizens attending the most recent community meeting to learn more about the foundation’s business plan were members of the gallery – what they learned is that the City Council did not require the foundation to consider a place for Arts of Snohomish, and so they didn’t.
Finding a place for the popular gallery, however, is not the main reason to broaden our knowledge of how the entire historic site could be used. The notion of returning the former library to its pre-1968 state is conveniently nostalgic, but it dismisses the evidence of demographics to shape public places.
The building was too small in 1966, when the population of Snohomish was still less than 5,000 and the library board began its campaign for the addition. Some 30 years later, the board commissioned two architectural firms to study and plan a major expansion, resulting in a torturous path of community involvement that eventually led to our new library on Maple Avenue. So the Carnegie foundation’s boast that its plan to restore the historic building to as it was built in 1910 will serve the community for the next 100 years – a population now approaching 9,000 and growing at a rate of 2.7 percent per year – is fantasy.
The second knot tied by the City Council is that the Carnegie cannot be restored for use as a municipal building. The root of this restriction can be traced to a 2002 survey seeking uses for the recently vacated library. The idea of filling the former reading room with cubicles for bureaucrats was universally rejected. Yet an idea staring us in the face (every time the council meets in the school district’s board room in fact), to create a town hall campus of award-winning architecture, for City Council and other community meetings, a venue for small art events, plus a home for both the Carnegie Educational Center and Arts of Snohomish, is ineligible for consideration under this blanket restriction.
Until the Snohomish City Council frees its volunteer board to imagine and investigate the full potential of the historic Carnegie site and building, its proposal will be more about what we can’t do than what we can.
Warner Blake of Snohomish was a member of the Carnegie Preservation Committee from 2004-2005.
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