Did Clinton sign the last beam when they tore this building down?
Posted on 05/24/2003 8:28:19 AM PDT by HAL9000
It has taken two weeks, 402 fine-tip markers and a college student with a bad case of writer's cramp to sign the names of more than 5,000 donors onto the white beam.Armed with a new Sharpie and surrounded by workers building the multimillion-dollar presidential library that the beam is a part of, Bill Clinton made the marker count 403.
More than 3,000 people cheered Friday as the former president signed his name to the beam that completes the skeleton of his presidential library in Little Rock.
The Starship rock song "We Built This City" played from a speaker as a 29-foot, white, steel beam was hoisted to the top of the library's frame.
On nearly 30 acres of parkland, the Clinton center will open in the fall of 2004 and will feature a 20,000-square-foot museum, an archive of Clinton's papers and a college of public service. "I've lived a highly improbable life," Clinton told the crowd gathered on the construction site in downtown Little Rock. "I hope this library and a museum will capture a little of that, but in a larger sense."
The topping-out ceremony marked completion of the library's structural phase and signifies that the library is about 35 percent done, library officials say.
Also at the ceremony, officials announced a $4 million donation from the Sturgis Family Foundation to help renovate the 1899 Choctaw Railroad Station. Work will begin this summer to transform the station into the Clinton School of Public Service, which will be affiliated with the University of Arkansas System. "We have to believe in the importance and integrity and nobility of public service, and we have to encourage good people to get into it," Clinton said. "I hope this graduate program will accomplish that."
Ground was broken on the library site in December 2001, and work began last year after resolution of a dispute over the number of union workers allowed on the project.
The $160 million library is to open Nov. 18, 2004, amid a week of scheduled activities, said officials with the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation.
By the time it opens next year, more than 300 people will have worked on the steel-and glass edifice.
At Friday's ceremony, Clinton was joined on stage by two dozen of those workers, including Thomas and Kenneth Bolton, brothers who are cement masons on the project. "I've been to plenty of topping-out ceremonies, but this is the first where I've got to meet a president," Thomas Bolton said. "You really feel that this is going to be something big."
Clinton's signature joins that of donors who paid $35 or more to have their names on the 650-pound beam.
Sean Sonta, a senior at Lyon College in Batesville, spent the past two weeks signing each name onto the beam. "My hand doesn't hurt so bad anymore," said Sonta, an intern for the Clinton foundation. "I need to find some more work to do now."
More than 80,000 people have donated at least $100 each to the library, Clinton said, thanking them during the ceremony. "We're in a race to the finish line now," Clinton said of fundraising efforts.
Last year, the library project made Little Rock history when the Clinton foundation doled out the final payment on a $185,000 building permit, believed to be the largest ever for the city.
Design plans will soon be unveiled for transforming the Rock Island railroad bridge into a pedestrian walkway across the Arkansas River, connecting Little Rock and North Little Rock.
Meanwhile, in a former car dealership on the edge of downtown Little Rock, an army of archivists continue to sift through more than 80 million pages of documents and nearly 80,000 artifacts from Clinton's presidency.
The papers and items will be taken to the library and museum next summer.
Archivists are gearing up for the initial release of Clinton's papers in 2006. "I hope [the library] will capture America's transformation into the 21 st century, what it was like when we started, what it was like when we finished," Clinton said.
Clinton foundation officials also are stepping up library publicity and fund-raising efforts. Billboards depicting the library have been placed around the state, and an information kiosk has opened in Little Rock's River Market District.
A cookbook featuring recipes by Clinton and other celebrities will be released this summer.
One book Clinton hyped during the event were the memoirs of his wife, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was not at the event. He also said he is hard at work at his memoirs, which will be released sometime next year. "It's really, really good," Clinton said of his wife's book, which will be released next month. "Arkansas comes out well in it."
The library has been a labor of love for Clinton and for the city for several years. After Clinton chose the library's warehouse site in 1997, Little Rock fought and won two court battles over the city's funding for the project and seizure of the land.
Little Rock leaders, however, say the library is transforming the city. "New businesses are coming here, and the city is attracting a great deal of attention because of the library," Little Rock Mayor Jim Dailey said. "We're just now beginning to see the effects that this is going to have on our city."
Integrity? Yeah right. How could he even make a statement like that with his track record? Integrity is one thing Slick never possessed.
Did Clinton sign the last beam when they tore this building down?
You think I’m kidding?
They really did tear that down.
Click here.
Excerpt:
Who is to blame when a historic landmark is lost? Part of the blame belongs to a throw-away society that places little premium on historical structures. Some of the blame must accrue to preservationists and historians who failed to recognize the significance of this structure hidden within May Supply Company. Most of the blame, however, must go to the Clinton Library Foundation and the City of Little Rock, neither of whom showed any evidence of a good faith effort to evaluate various options for keeping the station or moving a smaller representative section to a nearby site. One must also wonder why Clinton library site engineers failed to call attention to this historical building during the early stages of the library design. Site engineers had conducted exhaustive surveys of the area, surveys which had given them access to this building while it was cocooned within other structures and effectively hidden from the public. Were the survey engineers incapable of recognizing an unquestionably historic structure, or was their silence a deliberate calculated effort to conceal details of a landmark which they considered expendible?
Oh, that's right, I forgot it's on display on the Mr. personality show!
Compare President Bush’s magazine cover to clintoon's magazine cover:
Yeah, he would be the one to know all about fine dining.
Burger bar celebrates Clinton visit
Blech!
The caption to another AP photo put the crowd at 2,500.
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