The giant windows of the Colorado Springs Public Library seemed to capture the city’s founding vision: open communion between mankind and nature. Established in 1871 as a health spa and tourist retreat, Colorado Springs invited visitors to purify body and soul in an environment of golden sun, cathedral mountains, and crystal-clear air. All of those virtues poured in through the library’s massive glass inlets—marking it, like the whole community, as a place of true enlightenment.

But the library also symbolized something else: Colorado Springs’s evolution from resort town into true metropolis. Constructed in 1905 as part of the “City Beautiful” campaign, it reflected the community’s growing self-confidence—as well as its growing wealth, a result of the gold strikes at nearby Cripple Creek. It also bore witness to the beneficence of Andrew Carnegie, who underwrote construction of more than 1,500 public libraries throughout the United States—including this one, toward which he donated $60,000.

It was Colorado Springs’s main library until 1968, when the adjacent Penrose Public Library opened. The Carnegie building remained in use as a repository of special research collections, but its great windows were painted over, darkening the once bright interior. Today, historic preservationists have restored the giant portals to their original transparency—and allowed the healthful rays of the city’s origins to shine through again.