Tag archives: Michael Towbes Library Plaza

Now that Towbes Plaza has been ceremonially launched with an enormous pair of scissors, here comes the Local Author Book Festival to break the place in! Santa Barbara is unfairly over-blessed by the g*ds of literary talent, and here’s a chance to walk among these leading lights. Poets, novelists, authors all – some 40 of […]

When I was young, libraries were my gateway to adventure. I traveled through stories, climbed metaphorical mountains, and learned boundless skills, all from the coziness of an armchair. Stepping into a library always felt like stepping into a world where anything was possible, an enchanted gateway that took me on journeys beyond the horizon. This […]

Last Sunday’s opening of the new Michael Towbes Library Plaza was everything the Journal’s Jeff Wing predicted it would be in a recent edition of the weekly MJ. It was indeed a mezzo shout of happy civic hollering as a Pandora’s box of color and sound reverberated on the sun splashed block party on Anapamu […]

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie made a lot of money and couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. “The man who dies rich dies disgraced,” he wrote, and lived his credo. His stubbornly stated goal was to give away – in his lifetime – his entire fortune to causes which he felt would raise and edify […]

The Santa Barbara Library Foundation’s director Lauren Trujillo is in a celebratory mood.  The foundation’s $5.4 million capital campaign to revitalize the historic plaza at the Santa Barbara Library, a once bustling pedestrian thoroughfare that had fallen into disrepair, has been fully funded. The organization raised nearly 60 percent of the dollars from private contributions […]