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Exterior renovations at Hastings Museum include a new walkway as well as a pergola.

Exterior renovations at Hastings Museum include a new walkway as well as a pergola.

Visitors to the Hastings Museum will notice a refreshed front entrance.

The first phase of that project included a gently sloping walkway leading from the parking lot to the doors on the west side of the building.

The work also includes storm sewer drainage, emergency egress lighting, lighting controls and replacement of sod.

The second phase of the project includes a lumber pergola, electrical outlets, fence, gate and surfacing for an outdoor classroom.

Although Phase 2 had a deadline of May 31, the work already is largely complete.

“We are actually very much ahead of schedule,” Museum Director Teresa Kreutzer-Hodson said. “This project is not slated to be complete until May. We do have some grass planting that needs to be done, but that can’t be accomplished until late March or early April. Once we get the grass in, then we will start putting in our classroom components for that.”

The grass has to establish itself, so the museum won’t actively use those areas until the fall.

Everything except the fenced-in area will be usable by museum patrons this summer.

There are benches that also will be installed once the weather improves.

Most of the contract work is complete.

“We’re very excited because it looks nice, it’s building a lot of interest. The walkway is so much nicer to approach the facility, get closer to the Martin Brothers,” Kreutzer-Hodson said of the bronze statue on the west side of the museum of two brothers on horseback.

A Kool-Aid Man statue also will be added on the walkway.

“There’s still some changes to come,” Kreutzer-Hodson said.

Trees were planted in fall 2021 at the base of the walkway.

“Of course there’s going to be other plantings we will do when it warms up this spring,” she said.

Kreutzer-Hodson said the contractors working on the project have been good about moving the project forward and keeping it on task.

She was a little surprised the pergola was completed as early as it was.

“We weren’t expecting that to happen until later this spring, so it was nice when they got started on it,” she said. “The one thing we are facing is we don’t have all the components for the lighting that needs to go in there.”

With the outdoor classroom space, instructors won’t constantly need to move learning materials in and out of the building.

“It’s also something that’s fenced in, so if we have really young children it’s less of a worry if they are getting away from their group,” Kreutzer-Hodson said. “It keeps them a little more on task.”

Plans are in place to have open time allowing the public to use the outdoor classroom space.

Reworking the walkway leading to the museum’s front entrance also meant fixing spots where water would leak into the museum basement.

Kreutzer-Hodson recalled a day with hail and tornado activity in the area recently. There was no leaking after that weather event.

“I would’ve actually suspected we would have,” she said. “That was really the big reason we did the patio: We had this leak that was ruining walls we just fixed and we had done everything we could do above surface.”

When contractors tore out the patio, they found cracks where it looked like water was leaking.

“We think they got it,” she said. “We haven’t had any water. We’re very happy about that.”

The museum also is planning for a new exhibit relating to the Naval Ammunition Depot and additional storage space funded by the city’s half-cent sales tax. The additional storage space will go where the Kool-Aid exhibit is now in the basement, so Kool-Aid will be moved to the second-floor gallery.

Kreutzer-Hodson said the goal is to have the design for the Kool-Aid exhibit completed by the Kool-Aid Days festival in August.

“We can at least show that off and start getting more interest and being transparent about what it is going to look like,” she said.

The museum will work on collection storage expansion and the NAD exhibit once Kool-Aid is moved.

“There’s some real consequences with timelines with some of the delays everybody is experiencing,” she said.

She thinks the museum’s current casework is inefficient in its use of space.

The entire east side of the second floor will be dedicated to the NAD and Hastings history.

The Alexander House will be shifted to the opposite wall and will be used more as an exhibit space, so the façade will remain. Visitors could find different Hastings pieces at various times.

“So maybe this month we open something on cigar factories and then in six months maybe we do something on the parks system,” Kreutzer-Hodson said. “It’s something we want to keep as a changing piece and keep it tied to the history of Hastings and not just one period in time, but all periods.”

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