History of Academy Square
The Brigham Young Academy was one of the largest school buildings in the western Rocky Mountain region. The Principal of the Academy, Karl G. Maeser, designed the building with the help of Don Carlos Young as the architect. The Academy was located in Northern Provo. The name of the building has changed many times: in 1898, it was known as the High School Building, and in 1922 it was known as the Education Building, which it remained until 1968.
For the next 20 years, Academy Square remained vacant and slowly began to deteriorate. While real estate developers were eager to tear down the dilapidated buildings, Provo residents supported the preservation of the historic site. In 1997, a municipal bond and private donations financed the renovation of the Education Building; the other three buildings on Academy Square were demolished to make room for a parking garage. Fundraising and restoration efforts were spearheaded by BYU professor L. Douglas Smoot, who gained the moniker "the man who saved Academy Square." Construction was completed in 2001 and the project succeeded to what is now known as the Provo City Library.
Read more about this topic: Provo City Library
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, academy and/or square:
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)