Diana Wong, Branch Manager of the Bob Lucas Memorial Library, shows renderings of the expansion project.
In October of this year, the Altadena Library Foundation was awarded a $50,000 PCF Capital Campaign Grant in support of its major renovation and expansion project at the Bob Lucas Memorial Library, one of two libraries in the Altadena Library District. The project nearly doubles the usable square footage of the branch library by adding an Adult Literacy Center, a dedicated children’s area, and an outdoor reading garden.
The Bob Lucas Memorial Library is home to the District’s long-standing Adult Literacy Program. With this capital project, the library will finally be able to offer literacy learners dedicated classroom space for individual, small, and large group sessions.
“With grant support from the Pasadena Community Foundation, this building project will help the Altadena Library District realize Bob Lucas’s vision,” says Mark Mariscal, board chair of the Altadena Library Foundation. “(Lucas) understood the enormous influence and power of the written word, and he hoped that by making books, literature, and literacy skills training more available, others would learn how personal freedom could be achieved through reading.”
About Bob Lucas
Born in Chicago, Robert “Bob” Lucas was a trailblazing journalist, photographer, and writer. He spent his early career in Chicago and New York City, before moving to Los Angeles, where he worked at NBC-TV and ABC-TV. From 1976-1981, he was the editor of Jet Magazine.
Altadena became Lucas’s home in 1971. Later that decade, he began his campaign to reopen a branch library on Altadena’s west side that had been closed following the 1978 passage of Proposition 13. He was passionate about literacy and making books more available to residents in that area.
Lucas served as President of the Board of Trustee at the Altadena Library District, and he visited the library almost every day. Before he passed, Lucas was delighted to learn that his efforts were successful: The branch would be re-opened. Sadly, he did not live to see the facility named in his honor in 1991. Today the Bob Lucas Memorial Library & Literacy Center continues to remind and inspire us all to meet the challenges in the fight for literacy and education in our community.