Preservation of the Carnegie Library
The following letter to the editor appeared in the Observer the other day and I felt a need to repost it here. I personally feel that there should be an effort made by La Grande Main Street and other preservation/revitalization efforts going on to find some way to include some of these landmark buildings along with the organizations attached to them (UCACC) into the historical district. I feel we need to acknowledge these places and create some sort of program to include them. The letter below was written by Barb Dimond, President of the Union County Art and Culture Center.
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Dear Editor,
I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate City of Elgin on the success of its collaborative efforts to save and revitalize one of the area’s exceptional historical treasures, The Elgin Opera House. Winning the American Recovery and Reinvestment Grant bears witness to the fact that government and local citizens are most effective when they work together to benefits us all!
La Grande’s Old Library, a Carnegie Building, represents one of La Grande’s best opportunities to preserve our history and the legacy of our past. This beautiful structure should be included in the current efforts being made to revitalize and preserve the buildings of the downtown area. Currently, the Carnegie is not part of the preservation project. The Carnegie Building is a critical part of La Grande’s history and culture. Functioning as the Union County Art and Culture Center, it provides an increasingly vital resource for community cultural activities, classes and events. The work at this center highlights our area’s most renewable and sustainable assets – the artisans and craftsmen of our community.
The UCACC sincerely hopes the citizens of La Grande and the City Government will partner with us to preserve this important asset to our community. While misinformation about what is required abounds, we need only look at communities around us, Elgin, Baker City, Pendleton, Walla Walla and Union to see the benefits of investing in the preservation of the legacy of our past. We hope that the City of La Grande and it’s citizens will see the value of including the Carnegie Library Building, the “Old Library”, in the downtown historic preservation effort and not let this part of our valued history fall away.
Congratulations to Elgin and thanks for the inspiration!
Barb Dimond, President
Union County Art and Culture Center
Well, here’s another building with its structural integrity in question; and articles pop up every so often from folks like myself who deeply appreciate architecural merit and want to see classic old historic buildings preserved. We fear someone will come along and tear it down. We fear the costs of keeping a landmark structure up to code will outweigh the costs to maintain it. Since I’ve been in town, we lost the original courthouse, the old Observer building, and the roundhouse (well, the roundhouse outlived its purpose). Those structures were built dring a short period of time just prior to World War One when LaGrande unfortunately experienced poor quality mortar. There must have been some questionable lumber too…as I remember the old courthouse having some seriously bowed ceilings. The old library suffered from creaks, leaks and settling and the confinements of an expanding library. Yet there are so many buildings downtown that are just outright suffering from old ago–from the old Salvation Army thrift store on Fir & Madison and the furniture warehouse on the corner of Greenwwod & Jefferson that are crumbling from the rumbling of trains to those still standing after fire and rain like the old theater in the back of The Tropidara…every city has is decay even though the plan is to build everything to last forever. I hope the plan would be to construct buildings that display a community pride in civic buildings (like a classic train station, library, city hall, courthouse) and not to build eyesores that look like storage sheds, box stores and a block of flats. What’s it going to take to preserve Carnegie Library? It may go the route of the grand staircase at E.O.U. or the Hot Lake sanitorium; i.e. a large infusion of money by people who care, or a public works or restoration grant before it falls under what criteria a building with registered national historic landmark status will implement.