Bowers Museum Essay

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Jeremy Benguma Professor Amir Sharifi ESL 53C April 18, 2014 Bowers Museum During my weekend, on Saturday March 8th, 2014, I spent the whole day, with my aunt, who volunteered as a tour guide, at the Bowers Museum. She helps out by answering questions, and explaining about cultural artifacts, to young high school students. So that is when I got the idea, to do up a profile about the Bowers Museum. The Bowers Museum is located in Santa Ana, Orange County, California. The museum was named after Charles Bowers, a late 1800s Orange County land developer, who donated the land on which it stands to the City of Santa Ana. The museum was first constructed in 1931, after the death of Ada Bowers (Charles’s Wife) who had left the property abandoned. The new building remained unused for four years, because of the Great Depression, which had stopped the city from paying any operating funds. After four years the Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum then opened its doors to the public as a city-run museum devoted primarily to the history of Orange County. In 1987, the City of Santa Ana closed down the museum, to reopen as a totally new and transformed building. In October 1992, the Bowers Museum opened its 63,000-squard-foot facility which is six times larger than the original museum, and can hold up to a crowd of over 17,000 people. On February 18, 2007, the Bowers Museum, went through a second expansion, and have opened the new Dorothy and Donald Kennedy Wing. In the company of the extended new wing, the museum added a new 30,000 square feet room, and has doubled its exhibition space; the museum constructed a 300-seat auditorium, and created an indoor space to host events that can hold up to 500 people. As I was standing outside the museum, I could see that the entrance towards the museum was almost like the front entrance of a small-sized Catholic Church. The height of
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