Tick, tock. The countdown to the grand reopening of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum is on.
Work that began last July to upgrade the downtown museum's aging heating and air conditioning system is nearly complete, officials said in a news release Wednesday. Over the coming weeks, the system will go through testing and commissioning to ensure it functions properly.
The $6.2 million capital project inside the 121-year-old building that was formerly the El Paso County courthouse also included renovation of an existing gallery, plus construction of a new exhibition gallery and a new publicly-viewable collections processing and exhibit preparation workspace.
Once the museum reopens in the main facility, visitors will have access to spaces previously inaccessible to them.
"It's such an elegant space and people don't really know what to expect," Director Matt Mayberry said Thursday, surrounded by various artifacts inside the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum's temporary annex. The annex opened last July, across the museum's lawn in the Plaza of the Rockies, to accommodate and engage visitors during construction.
A father and child explore the Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition “Black Wings: American Dreams of Flight” at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum annex at the Plaza of the Rockies in downtown Colorado Springs.
If all goes to plan, Mayberry and his staff hope the main building will reopen this July. No official grand reopening date has been announced.
Staff are creating two new exhibits that will be ready by the time of the reopening. A third will soon follow and by the end of the year there will hopefully be a fourth new exhibit, Mayberry said.
The new heating and air conditioning system is crucial to allowing the museum to do its work, he said.
The Division III Courtroom inside the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, in the 1903 building that was once the El Paso County courthouse, is being rehabilitated into an exhibition gallery space.
"We can't do all the other things we need to do unless we take care of our collection," he said.
A dependable heating and air conditioning system is needed to adequately preserve fragile artifacts like documents and Native American baskets. Extreme fluctuations in temperature can hurt them, officials previously said.
The museum's temporary annex, located at Plaza of the Rockies, 121 S. Tejon St., Suite 100, will close May 1.
Visitors are welcome until then on Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Admission is free to visit the three annex exhibits: "Black Wings: American Dreams of Flight," "Ute Knowledge: Colorado's Original STEM," and "Story of Us: Pikes Peak Regional History."
For more about the museum and its exhibits, visit cspm.org or follow on social media.
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