Leonardo da Vinci’s machines — kind of — will call Pueblo home ...Middle East

PUEBLO — A native of this southern Colorado city with a passion for education, the arts and his community retired a few years ago, took a trip to France and visited the village where Leonardo da Vinci spent the last years of his life.

In serendipitous fashion, that led to Pueblo’s recent announcement that it will be the home of the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of North America. 

The as in the only museum on the continent with a permanent display of machines designed by da Vinci in the 15th and 16th centuries and brought to life beginning in the mid-20th century by the Artisans of Florence, Italy. The machines reveal da Vinci’s ideas about flight, space, music, anatomy, robotics — the list is seemingly endless as scholars and artisans have studied and attempted to catalog thousands of pages of his sketches and notes.

The hand-crafted machines, such as a drum-playing robot, are made with materials and techniques that would have been available in da Vinci’s lifetime.

The museum, expected to open late this year on the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk, is being hailed as a potential boost for tourism and economic development downtown, and possible redemption for the failed Sports Performance Center deal with the Professional Bull Riders Association.

“I think it’s going to help put Pueblo on the map,” Mayor Heather Graham said in an interview. “We’ll become more of a tourist destination. And it’s right on the Riverwalk.

“It is huge for our economy here in Pueblo.”

Joe Arrigo, the man who started it all after that visit to Amboise, France, took a moment to celebrate Feb. 20 after the Colorado Economic Development Commission gave final approval of the deal between multiple state and local agencies and the museum board.

He went to lunch in Denver with Graham and other Pueblo leaders after the EDC meeting where the project was approved and had a glass of champagne with friends that evening.

But early the next day, he was attacking a list of things that must fall quickly into place to make the vision a reality: hire a fundraiser and kick off a $4 million fundraising campaign; hire a director; move sports equipment out of the space that will house the museum; get preliminary design ideas on paper, and answer endless phone calls and texts.

“At this point, I’m wearing all my hats,” he said as he drove from the igloos where some of the machines from traveling exhibits are stored east of Pueblo at PuebloPlex, the former Pueblo Chemical Depot. But he smiled, too, remembering the vision that keeps him going.

“What this will do for our kids is so positive. We want to encourage curiosity and exploration, and to make the community a better place.” 

How it started

Arrigo didn’t return from France with the idea of starting a museum. But he was entranced by da Vinci’s workshops and gardens and an exhibit of machines he had designed. 

While perhaps best known as a Renaissance painter, da Vinci was a polymath and his fields of study included engineering, math, architecture and botany. He invented war machines for the city of Milan, such as moveable barricades.

Many of his ideas remained in notebooks for hundreds of years until the sketches and notes were deciphered and the item was created. The Artisans have built models such as a spring-powered car, parachutes, a helicopter and a mechanical lion.

They have even discovered among his notes some sketches that resemble a modern-day drone. 

So, when the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center had a chance to host a traveling exhibit of some of these machines as part of its 50th anniversary celebration, Arrigo helped make it happen. The exhibit ran from June 4 to Oct. 29, 2022.

That was how he and a group of Italian artisans found each other and the magic started. 

While the Artisans of Florence were in Pueblo to set up and take down the exhibit they told Arrigo about the challenges of moving and storing their displays in the United States.

Arrigo owned a building restoration business, was a cellist with the Pueblo Symphony, briefly taught high school music classes and has served on many civic boards. He didn’t hesitate to go “into chamber mode.”

He’d been on a list at PuebloPlex to get one of the 620 storage igloos, built by the Army in 1942 to store munitions. After World War II, they were used to store mustard gas and nuclear weapons.

The base was marked for closure in 1991, but the weapons stockpiles had to be destroyed or moved before the land was turned over to the redevelopment authority created by the Colorado legislature. Eventually, the authority was renamed PuebloPlex and the Army began formally transferring portions of the property to it last summer.

Many of the igloos — concrete vaults buried under 2 feet of earthen cover spread across about 3,100 acres of land — were empty and available.

Arrigo made some calls and got one so the Artisans of Florence could move their machines directly from the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center exhibit to the naturally climate-controlled igloo, which they were delighted with. Then he got two more — one of them to store the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium that was being removed from Centennial High School in Pueblo. (More on that in a minute.)

Meanwhile, the Artisans, who for three generations have been researching da Vinci’s files and bringing his designs to life, told him about their desire to have a permanent museum in North America and how they’d been looking for a location for a few years. They have museums in Florence, of course, and in France, Australia, Brazil and South Korea.

“How about Pueblo?” Arrigo said he suggested. Within weeks, Arrigo created the nonprofit Pueblo STEAM Works and gathered a board of science-minded local citizens. That organization, created Feb. 21, 2023, changed its name to the Southern Colorado Science Center, and is now doing business as the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of North America.

“There was something about Pueblo that we loved,” said Tom Rizzo, director of traveling exhibitions for the Artisans of Florence. “The passion the people had to do something for their community was incredible. There was no money, just a vision.”

Rizzo was in Pueblo in early February for the lease signing and to attend a program featuring da Vinci scholar Sara Taglialagamba, who told a standing-room-only crowd at the Pueblo library about da Vinci’s math and science innovations.

The newly formed nonprofit took its vision and quickly raised enough money for a feasibility study; partners at Colorado State University-Pueblo did a business study. They talked to everybody about the museum and began to look at potential sites. 

When the Professional Bull Riders abandoned the Sports Performance Center at the Pueblo Convention Center, Arrigo’s team zeroed in on the nearly 18,000-square-foot building.

A prime space

Pueblo in 2005 lured Professional Bull Riders Inc. from Colorado Springs to a Riverwalk location with $7.7 million of taxpayer-approved funds for a 33,000-square-foot headquarters building and a parking structure.

The Sports Performance Center came later, through a deal between the Pueblo Urban Renewal Authority, or PURA, the city and state Economic Development Commission. The state was trying to boost regional tourism at the time, and Pueblo’s convention center expansion project was one of five that shared in more than $400 million.

The city was approved by the state in 2012 to get up to $35.7 million for the expansion and Riverwalk improvements, using a state sales tax deferral system known as tax increment financing, according to EDC. 

As of March 5, urban renewal authority has received just over $24 million in state sales tax revenue for the project and expects to receive the remaining $10.8 million over the next 10 years, said Cherish Deeg, operations director for PURA. 

The expansion project, which included an exhibit hall, a parking garage, building repairs, Riverwalk improvements, a plaza honoring Pueblo’s Medal of Honor recipients and the Sport Performance Center space, was paid for with $17 million in tax-exempt bonds issued in 2017, a $14.4 million loan from the city and various grants and fees. The final bond payment is scheduled for December 2036, Deeg said.

The gleaming sports performance center on the south side of the Pueblo Convention Center fronts on the Riverwalk, adjacent to where a new boat house and public spaces are expected to open later this year. It was filled with city-owned workout equipment, including two mechanical bulls.

The PBR leased the location for $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year, said Elizabeth Gallegos, chair of the PURA board.

It wasn’t used much, and the lease expired at the end of 2023. PBR paid rent until June 2024, and in August announced it was moving its headquarters to Fort Worth, Texas. 

Unrelated to the museum deal, PBR just sold its four-story administrative building at 101 W. Riverwalk Place — the one funded in part by a city sales tax — to an unnamed buyer for $6 million, according to Pueblo County assessor’s records.

The buyer offered the building to the city for $7 million, and City Council gave final approval to the deal on a 5-2 vote on March 10. The building was appraised at $8 million in 2023, according to a background paper provided to Pueblo City Council in February. The city tried to buy the building for $8 million a year ago, but PBR went with another buyer and that deal fell through, Graham said on a March 12 podcast.

The city plans to consolidate most of its administrative departments in the building, allowing it to sell or stop leasing other buildings. It has been considering a new city administration building for several years and estimated that a new facility would cost $22 million, according to a March 3 presentation at a City Council work session.

PBR owned the upper three floors of 101 W. Riverwalk, but relinquished the lower level, which opens onto the Riverwalk, to the city because it did not meet its contractual obligation to have 180 employees by 2010, according to a Pueblo Chieftain article about PBR’s move to Texas.

Graham said the city has been working on a deal to sell that 8,000-square-foot floor building for several months, and a contract went to City Council on March 10. 

The council, on first reading, approved the $1.2 million sale to Erika Almeida-Trujillo, who plans to open a wellness center with a gym and smoothie shop in part of the building and rehabilitation center in the other half, according to a background paper with the council agenda. The property is known as units 1A and 1B of 101 W. Riverwalk Place. 

Pueblo officials seem ready to put the PBR chapter behind them, joking at the work session that they needed to quit calling it the PBR building and dubbed the administration building the “Riverwalk Building.” The Sports Performance Center is now known as the future home of the da Vinci museum.

Graham is largely credited by museum backers with pushing PURA to move quickly to get the Sports Performance Center leased to them.

“The PBR Sports Performance Center was generating zero dollars, because they weren’t using the facility,” she said of PBR on a recent city podcast to update citizens. “They didn’t have bull riders coming in and there was no running of the bulls down Union Avenue like there was supposed to be.”

There were few visitors, and certainly not the anticipated 30,000 a year.

And they had a bargain. PBR paid only $18,000 a year for a facility that PURA is leasing to the museum for $142,744 a year — almost eight times what PBR was paying in rent.

Graham said she got stakeholders together to talk about what they could do with the space, and the need to find a tenant that fit the state RTA project requirements to be unique, bring in out-of-state tourists, have an international component and significantly increase economic development and tourism in the community and the state.

Several ideas were floated, including maintaining it as a sports training facility, but none met all the criteria, and most were little more than a concept. Except for the da Vinci museum.

Approvals and contract

After a presentation to the PURA board Nov. 11, things moved more quickly. 

The museum board presented its plans to the state Economic Development Commission on Dec. 19 and, while supportive of the proposal, the EDC sought exclusivity guardrails on the lease agreement to ensure that this project would succeed.

Along with the healthy increase in rent, the lease assures that no other permanent display of the Artisans’ da Vinci work will appear in North America for 10 years. The rent collection was delayed for one year, as is common when an organization is getting up and running.

“The lease is equitable for all the parties involved,” PURA board chair Elizabeth Gallegos said, noting the board vote was unanimous. “There are good guardrails in the lease and everyone is protected.”

“I think it’s going to be a great economic driver,” she said. “It’s a transformative time in our city.”

She praised the process of working with the EDC and its “critique of every detail.”

The city did its homework and returned to EDC on Feb. 20, where the switch from the Sports Performance Center to the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of North America was approved. 

Projected to open in late November, the museum is slated to be open seven days a week and could have up to 19 jobs and an economic impact of up to $1.8 million the first year, according to the CSU study. That would be expected to jump to $2.3 million annually after five years.

Along with permanent displays of da Vinci’s machines, the museum will feature interactive educational displays and rotating exhibits, provided by the Artisans. 

It will also house a complete library of da Vinci’s Codices — sketches, notes and records — that Italian publisher Giunti Editore began reproducing in the 1960s. The publishing house sold a set to the museum for $130,000 — “a deal,” Arrigo said. 

The last approval came Feb. 24, when the Pueblo City Council gave final approval for a patio lease agreement for an outdoor café at the museum. 

Arrigo’s already talking about gelato and Italian coffee. And occasional special exhibits where the Artisans will bring in displays featuring the scientific work of Galileo and Archimedes brought to life in the form of such things as gravity, motion and time machines. And the addition of the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium that was painstakingly disassembled before the old Pueblo Centennial High School was demolished.

“We had about 10 days to get that planetarium,” he said, describing how a “couple of 80-year-olds” figured out how to lower the dome, number the 80 panels and prepare them for storage. After the museum is up and running, he wants an addition for the planetarium.

Then he waves his arm and says, “But that’s all in the future. Right now, we need to get this equipment moved out here and have a fundraising kickoff.”

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