Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard

The low Neo-Classical building next to Plaza Park started life in nineteen oh seven as the Oxnard Public Library, paid for by Andrew Carnegie after Oxnard's first mayor wrote him a personal letter in nineteen oh four. Carnegie offered ten thousand dollars in February nineteen oh six, and the city completed the building in time for residents to read about the San Francisco earthquake. By the nineteen seventies the library had outgrown the building.

A federal grant of one hundred thirty-three thousand dollars restored it, and it reopened in August nineteen eighty as the Carnegie Cultural Arts Center. Six years later the city renamed it the Carnegie Art Museum, focusing on California art from the twentieth century. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-one, making it one of the few Carnegie libraries still actively serving the public in Southern California.