xml:space="preserve">
xml:space="preserve">
Advertisement
Advertisement

Selle: Time to end Waukegan's dreams for the Carnegie Library

Waukegan's Carnegie Library, built more than a century ago and vacant for nearly 50 years, is being eyed by a non-profit organization for redevelopment as a museum and cultural center in honor of author Ray Bradbury.
Waukegan's Carnegie Library, built more than a century ago and vacant for nearly 50 years, is being eyed by a non-profit organization for redevelopment as a museum and cultural center in honor of author Ray Bradbury. (Dan Moran / Lake County News-Sun)

Hanging on to the past can result in a bad case of tunnel vision. Take the sluggish plans to turn the old Carnegie Library in downtown Waukegan into a standing tribute to Ray Bradbury, one of the city’s favorite sons.

Organizers of the Ray Bradbury Experience Museum are kicking off a fund-raising drive to pay for the millions of dollars needed to turn the empty library at Sheridan Road and Washington Street into an homage to the late author.

Advertisement

Like the extension of Route 53 into Lake County, seems we’ve been hearing for years about using the library — which has been vacant for decades — as the headquarters honoring the author who was raised in Waukegan. The current plan is to start off the museum in a good-sized Genesee Street storefront north of Washington Street with different themed areas and then move the whole expo to the library once funding follows.

Seems the Genesee Street location makes more community sense than using the Greek-revival Carnegie library at 1 N. Sheridan Road, which has been eyed as the Bradbury site for years with public and private plans. Indeed, it’s time to raze the edifice.

Advertisement

Although it’s listed as a Waukegan landmark and in the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places, there’s nothing landmark or historic about the building. The tie to Bradbury is he biked or strolled — maybe he followed the city’s ravines — to the library from the family’s homestead on St. James Street, just south of Washington Street.

Thousands of other Waukeganites used the library, marveled at its volumes and checked out its books. It wasn’t the Ray Bradbury Library, after all.

The library was one of the more than 100 that Carnegie, the founder of U.S. Steel, built in Illinois and one of the thousands the Scottish immigrant funded across the globe. He spent nearly $60 million of his own money in the late 19th and early 20th centuries granting towns library funding. That included a gift of $25,000 to Waukegan as seed money for the library.

Many of the Carnegie libraries look the same as Waukegan’s declining building because they were designed by the same Chicago architects. Since the city moved to the current library at Clayton and County streets in 1965, the old building has sat empty and in disrepair.

At one time, its lower floor was filled with fetid water and mold crawling its walls. That had been remedied, but it currently is a structure looking for a purpose. It still needs lots and lots of TLC.

There are good people who still have dreams of using the building for something, anything. Among the ideas floated include a cultural center. But it is time to pivot and concede the vision of using the old Carnegie Library for the shrine to Bradbury, who died in 2012, has faded.

The latest plans museum organizers unveiled last week appear to be solid, especially the rocket-riding statue of the author known for “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “Dandelion Wine,” his paean to Green Town — er, Waukegan.

Keeping an expanded Bradbury museum surrounded by stores and restaurants in the city’s once-vibrant downtown shopping area is more practical for ease of access, parking and community entry. Or close to the historic Genesee Theatre, where Bradbury had to have seen at least one moving picture.

The Carnegie Library sticks out like a haunted house, a lone sentinel overlooking the Amstutz Expressway. It’s time to see the light at the end of the tunnel and give up the ghost of channeling Andrew Carnegie’s charitable gift in the early 1900s into the Bradbury Museum of 2020.

Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.

Recommended on Chicago Tribune

Advertisement
Advertisement
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/lake-county-news-sun/opinion/ct-lns-selle-waukegan-carnegie-library-dreams-st-1016-story.html
www.chicagotribune.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-04
324822
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:V6VRPONPVHR4NRVRDSZZ5A7AIQ2WEGRJ
<urn:uuid:242b38d1-abcc-454a-a225-ecb1a59d43e1>
2021-01-22T16:09:04Z
23.50.225.56
text/html
sha1:B63DFQKN7CPU25XPYLLYOO4NXZOVFCWK
<urn:uuid:33468d6f-8471-4fad-b279-0552893de700>
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/lake-county-news-sun/opinion/ct-lns-selle-waukegan-carnegie-library-dreams-st-1016-story.html
response
<urn:uuid:81a82ee4-8a4e-489c-a095-aee4ddc46db3>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-04
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-103.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/