More than Books: Santa Barbara Library Plaza Set to Open

More than Books: Santa Barbara Library Plaza Set to Open

After Long Road of Setbacks and Delays, Michael Towbes Plaza Ready for Public

By Ryan P. Cruz | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
October 31, 2024

The doors to the Faulkner Gallery at the Santa Barbara Public Library’s downtown location — part of an Art Deco–style addition designed by famed architect Myron Hunt in 1930 — once opened up to three reflecting pools stretching out along a grass-lined plaza facing Anapamu Street. But over the years, the water features dried out, and the grass plaza faded into a concrete-filled space overgrown with weeds. Hardly a welcoming place. 

Visitors to the downtown library scurried past the ‘30s-era mural of a sun rising over a field of flowers — “Egyptian Sunburst Poppies,” designed by John Gamble — right over the gallery’s entrance. Who could be blamed for missing the historic tympanum doors on the library’s original entrance, designed in 1924 by Carleton Winslow, which had for years been hidden in plain sight behind a couple of overgrown trees?

It’s been too long since Santa Barbara residents got a clear look at the Central Library, one of downtown’s crown jewels. A long-overdue renovation project has fenced off the library since 2022, marred by construction delays, unexpected complications, and one of the rainiest seasons in recent history. But despite these setbacks, the three-phase project — funded in a public-private collaboration between the Santa Barbara Public Library Foundation and the City of Santa Barbara — is finally complete and ready for its debut this Sunday, when the Michael Towbes Library Plaza will be officially opened to the public in a block party event, Plaza Palooza.

Long Time Coming

The idea of flattening out the space in front of the library for a public plaza had been a dream for the city for more than 15 years. City Councilmember Eric Friedman, a longtime library advocate who served on the city’s library board and as president of the Library Foundation before being elected to City Council in 2017, remembers jumping at the idea as soon as he saw a rough sketch sometime around 2007.

Friedman worked with the library’s director at the time, Irene Macias, to get the idea across the library board for deeper discussion. It became a topic the board would brainstorm over the next few years, though when it started to gain traction, the big question of funding remained.

Around that time, the city and the Library Foundation had successfully worked together in what was a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership to build the Children’s Library. The Library Foundation raised more than $4 million, complemented by another half-million from the city. When the Library Foundation supporters saw that the city was willing to put up money, they became even more willing to donate.

Friedman was the Library Foundation’s president then, and he saw how energized the other board members were by the city’s participation in the Children’s Library. He was determined to create a plaza project that could help define the library, making it a beautiful gem, something for the whole community to enjoy.

“What I think is so important, and why it’s so critical,” he said, “is that downtown has struggled for so many years, and this is something we’re gonna be proud of in Santa Barbara right in the heart of downtown.”

By 2017, Friedman was elected to City Council, and though there was now growing support for the idea of a redesigned plaza, the next challenge was getting the project fully designed and funded. That in itself would be costly, and construction would certainly cost at least several more million dollars. 

But library folks, Friedman said, are not to be underestimated. Advocates came in to encourage the city to put in another half-million, which was not easy to come by with the city’s tight budget. After Friedman worked with the library board and his new colleagues on the city’s finance committee — including then-councilmember Gregg Hart — the city was able to secure the money to get the design done.

So after a decade of thinking and talking about a redesigned library plaza, the project was finally able to have a fully fleshed-out design. Now came a push to get the thing funded and built before something else happened to distract and deflate funding prospects. It was early 2019.

“Then COVID happened,” Friedman said.

Planning During a Pandemic

“It’s been a journey,” according to current Library Foundation Director Lauren Trujillo, who took over the position in December 2018. “Nobody could’ve anticipated the issues that COVID would cause.”

Once the foundation knew the city had approved the plans, the organization started the real heavy lifting of raising $5 million toward construction. This had to be added to two other central library renovation projects: an updated staff area and ADA-compliant elevators. With the world closed for the pandemic, all of the fundraising, Trujillo said, would have to be done remotely.

“I’d never done anything like that before, and I don’t think any of my colleagues had either,” she said, but “we raised $5 million over Zoom.”

The foundation hosted online fundraising meetings, provided updates to donors on video calls and even took them on one-on-one virtual tours of the space. Over two years, with most of their interactions over the computer screen, 500 donors had donated the $5 million needed to break ground on construction. The city agreed to fund the rest, another estimated $5 million, through Measure C funding.

During the ceremonial groundbreaking in May 2022, Trujillo, Friedman, and dozens of other city policymakers and big-money donors donned hard hats and shoveled into the dusty plaza ground. Then-Library Foundation Board President Anne Howard boasted that the plaza project would be about “more than books,” and would be a future place for the community to host events for years to come. At the time, they estimated the project would take up to 18 months.

It was a lofty goal that was impossible to meet. As soon as the excavation work began, workers discovered asbestos, forcing the downtown location to close completely in August 2022. 

Then came the rains. Two heavy rain events in early 2023 turned the recently dug-up plaza ground into a mud pit, and during the cleanup, work crews discovered “unexpected drainage issues,” Trujillo said. That could have been a bigger problem had it been discovered later in the process.

“It was a blessing in disguise,” she said.

The elevator project in the center of the library caused even more issues, forcing entire sections of the library to be boxed off and dispersing library staff to different parts of the building. 

“It was a game of Red Light, Green Light,” Trujillo said. “Open and close the library. Do some of the work drilling during the middle of the day.”

COVID also wreaked havoc on the supply chain, further delaying the project’s intricately cut tile mosaics and carved sandstone, which were only available through one supplier. 

Then there were staff disruptions in both the city and the library. Since the project broke ground, the city hired a new administrator, the library director and service manager were both placed on administrative leave and replaced, and there is a new manager overseeing the project.

Despite these setbacks, Trujillo said that donors remained strong in their support, in part due to the consistent updates from the foundation.

“When we first told them about this project, they knew that it would likely come with delays,” Trujillo said. “But with clear communication and transparency, they have stood by us, and the increased costs have not been a problem.”

In the summer of 2024, after tallying the extra costs incurred by delays, the city approved additional funding on its end, bringing the total cost of all three projects to more than $12 million. 

Behind-the-Scenes Heroes

In light of the many setbacks that forced the plaza, elevator, and staff area renovations to take much longer than anticipated, the library has flourished thanks to its “resilient and adaptive” staff, who Trujillo said were willing to work through construction and distractions to provide consistent services to the community.

“They are superheroes of our community,” Trujillo said, “front-line workers who handled not just the volatile construction space, but also the post-pandemic era.”

Some of the library staff have never known what a “normal” central library looked like. Since many were hired during construction, all they have seen are fences, wooden walls, and yellow tape.

The project took the input of hundreds of people, both financially and physically. More than 275 bricks are engraved with the names of those who donated toward the project, while the organizations and individuals who donated more than $10,000 have their names etched into sandstone tablets in the lower courtyard.

On the day that the fences were removed, just a week before the plaza was to be officially unveiled, Trujillo walked reporters through the completed project. The tile mosaics had finally arrived and shone in the sun, reminiscent of the three reflecting pools that originally stood in the same exact spot. The abstract mural of the rising sun and poppies, repainted in the original turquoise green and poppy orange, was back to its former glory, already proving to be an iconic spot for Instagram photos.

Four newly planted olive trees complement two historic oaks in the Woodward Grove on Anapamu Street, where visitors can now sit in the shade and crack open a book. As soon as the fences came down, people naturally started exploring the plaza.

At the library’s original main entrance, a crew of artists crawled across scaffolding to put the finishing touches on the historic tympanum doors, restoring the figures of Plato and Aristotle and the shields of four famous libraries across the world.

Linnea Dawson, the owner of Silverlake Conservation, described how she worked with painter Hannah Stahulak to restore both the Art Deco mural over the Faulkner Gallery entrance and the tympanum doors at the former main entrance. The crew gathered historic photos and old paint chips to match the colors to the original designs, finding the same exact shades of green and orange from nearly 100 years ago.

Both doorways had been obstructed by fencing and trees over the years, and now that they will finally be more accessible to the public, Trujillo is hoping that the community can appreciate and connect with the history of the library dating back more than a century.

The Finish Line

Though nothing has been publicly said about the personnel issues that led to former Library Director Jessica Cadiente’s departure, Trujillo credits Cadiente for guiding the project through many obstacles until she was replaced in March 2024.

“Jessica not only carried this initiative through the city’s complex processes, but also managed to keep the library accessible to the community throughout,” Trujillo said. “Her leadership, resilience, and commitment to both the library and this project have been invaluable.”

The library’s acting director, former senior assistant to the city administrator and budget manager Brandon Beaudette, has worked closely with new City Administrator Kelly McAdoo to ensure the project made it across the finish line — if not by the originally scheduled opening of October 2023, then at least as soon as possible.

“We’ve been really grateful for his leadership,” McAdoo said of Beaudette.

McAdoo was thrown into the late stages of the project after taking the position of city administrator back in May of this year. But before McAdoo even stepped into town, she started following city news closely, and the library plaza project was high on her priority list.

“Obviously, it’s a very complicated project,” McAdoo said. “The building is very old. Whenever you have that, you’re expecting things to happen.”

She hit the ground running, meeting with the Library Foundation, the city library advisory board, and other stakeholders to understand what needed to be done. Right away, she saw how important the library plaza renovation would be to the city’s plans for revitalizing downtown.

“The new library is just what the city needs to bring life back to downtown,” McAdoo said.

For Trujillo and the Library Foundation, the plaza is the “catalyst for the revitalization downtown,” and an example of a city project becoming a reality thanks to community buy-in.

“We’ve seen so many projects stay in the idea box,” Trujillo said. “Now, for the first time in a long time, we’re seeing a community-identified need come to fruition. And I think it gives us hope, and gives us the vision to imagine what State Street could become or what De la Guerra Plaza could become…. This is for the community, by the community.”

It also represents what could be the future for big projects in Santa Barbara. The Library Foundation’s $5 million toward the plaza construction, and another $1 million endowment for maintenance and programming for the space, was the shot in the arm needed to get the project off the ground.

“We’re very grateful to the Library Foundation,” McAdoo said. “They helped fund this, and their input was invaluable.”

Similar public-private partnerships, especially in a city with as much wealth as Santa Barbara, could be a way to connect the dots between what the city needs and the big-money donors it needs to get those things.

“The city has been reluctant in the past to engage in those [public-private] partnerships for a variety of reasons,” McAdoo said. “I feel like it was a lost opportunity. But I’m hopeful for the future.”

The plaza could also be seen as an argument in favor of the Measure I sales tax, which city officials say could bring in an additional $15 million annually toward the city’s general fund.

“Measure I would allow us to do more programming,” McAdoo said. “And that’s something the city has needed for a long time…. For me, libraries are community gathering spaces, and this has been a key resource … that has not been available.”

Plaza Palooza

On Sunday, November 3, the Michael Towbes Library Plaza will officially open to the public in a day-long event hosted by the city and the Library Foundation. From noon to 4 p.m., people can catch a glimpse of what will be the first of many events in the new 10,000-square-foot community space.

The plaza will be dedicated to its namesake, the late Michael Towbes, a famous Santa Barbara philanthropist whose foundation has donated more than $25 million to hundreds of organizations over four decades. It will be the first public space to be named in his honor.

In addition to the main plaza, the space also includes several smaller dedicated areas, including the Mithun Storytime Square, Woodward Grove, and Marjorie Reeds McNeely Community Courtyard. The entire plaza can now hold up to 1,200 people.

On Opening Day, the Faulkner Gallery’s turquoise doors will be open to the public for the first time in years. There will be performances by State Street Ballet, Flamenco Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Symphony, Franklin Elementary School Folklórico Academy, and Santa Barbara High School’s Jazz Band.

Anapamu Street will be closed to traffic along the whole block, where more than 50 nonprofits will have booths. Friends of the Library will host a book sale, and there will be library historical tours and free film screenings inside the gallery. Dave’s Dogs Grill and Elubia’s Kitchen will provide food, and the S.B. Bubble Guy and other kid-friendly events will be happening.

Councilmember Friedman, who has seen this project through to the end, said that the event will be just the beginning of what could be possible.

He envisions literary festivals, movie screenings, outdoor music festivals, block parties, and rentals for special events at the Towbes Plaza. This will blend well with other new downtown changes such as the Saturday morning Farmers’ Market move to State Street, and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s recently announced plan to open a cinema center at the Fiesta 5 theater — all things Friedman hopes will help build the momentum toward a strong downtown core.

“These things are going to be there permanently for decades to come,” he said. “I look back on it like this: When my kids ask me what did I do on the council — this is our legacy.”