BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
The opening of the new Palo Alto History Museum has been delayed indefinitely because the city-owned building is leaking, museum CEO Marguerite Gong Hancock announced Wednesday (Jan. 21).
The museum was scheduled to open in February.
The museum nonprofit is working with the city to assess and repair the water intrusion at 300 Homer Ave., Hancock said in an email yesterday.
“Taking the time to do this right is essential to the museum’s long-term success,” she said.
The historic Roth Building was built in 1932 as the Palo Alto Medical Foundation’s first home. The city bought the building in 2000 and approved plans to turn the site into a museum in 2007, but the museum nonprofit struggled to raise money for a renovation.
So the city pitched in $10.7 million and agreed to rent the building to the nonprofit for $1 a year for 40 years.
In exchange, the museum has to open bathrooms at Heritage Park and stay open for at least 20 hours per week.
Received federal earmarks
Then-Congresswoman Anna Eshoo earmarked another $3 million for the renovation, and Santa Clara County paid $100,000 for a new roof, $182,448 for new windows and $350,000 to restore an elevator from the 1940s.
The building was renovated by Palo Alto-based Vance Brown Builders, the same contractor that worked on the Junior Museum and Zoo at 1451 Middlefield Road and the Avenidas Senior Center at 450 Bryant St.
The city determined the museum contract was exempt from a competitive bidding process.
This was a bad idea from the very beginning. What a total waste of money. This site should have been used for something more useful like housing.
So, preserving a historic building, reflecting Palo Alto’s distinctive California Mission architecture, that was also the genesis of a sea-change in delivering in delivering medical services, is not a good idea?
Building housing here were largely be market-rate, perhaps offering new housing for another 100 Tech bros. The museum will serve the 68k residents of Palo Alto, and even more if you include surrounding communities.
Wow. 10.7 million to feed the ego of certain palo alto residents.
Not much historic in palo alto but don’t tell karen holman
Leaking story should not be trusted. Send an external inspector
The fact that the museum nonprofit received very few donations, and nearly all of the money is coming from the city, shows there’s no public demand for a Palo Alto history museum. The only purpose of this place is for politically connected socialites to throw parties. This could have been housing for people struggling to stay out of the cold. I guess council is showing us their true priorities.
A wrecking ball and bulldozer could save the city a lot of money. No point in throwing good money after bad. Find a broom closet at City Hall to store anything “historic” about Palo Alto. Then level this building and use the land for something else.
Leaks aside, I attended the museum’s soft opening where they shared the museum’s vision to build it as platform for people to imagine better futures. The concept is very “Palo Alto” without being pretentious. We don’t have any other community space like it and I’m excited for it to open.