A&M Corpus Christi renovating downtown building to hold drones, art and historical records

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi's plans for downtown Corpus Christi include a five-story building housing an art gallery, mission control center for a drone program and a new home for archives and historical documents.

The university is working to renovate an existing 79,000 square foot building at 233 N. Chaparral St. The building, near many Water Street restaurants, was once a JC Penney.

Once complete, the university plans to use the building to connect arts and media programs with the community, provide space for research and business incubator activities and expand the university's Lone Star Unmanned Aircraft Systems.

In November, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi President Kelly Miller shared information about the project with the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents' buildings committee. The committee appropriated nearly $8.4 million for phase one the renovations, adding to the $930,000 already directed by the university system towards the project. Included in that funding directed towards the project is a $2.8 million grant from the city of Corpus Christi.

"Because we're an island, we don't get brand recognition the same way (as others)," Miller told the regents in November. "You don't accidentally drive by us. This puts our branding in the middle of downtown Corpus Christi."

The first phase of renovations addresses the first and fourth floors of the building, with a completion date of fall 2024. The rest of the building will be addressed as funding becomes available.

An art gallery will be housed on the first floor.

"This is very important to add cultural vibrancy to the growing arts happening in Corpus Christi," Miller told the regents in November. "We need another gallery."

The fourth floor will include Lone Star UAS, Economic Development Council and College of Business iPort programs.

This will be Lone Star UAS's second mission control center, which is where drone missions are monitored and controlled.

"Our vision for this building goes beyond its physical structure; it is a strategic initiative aimed at driving economic development through robust industry partnerships," according to a statement shared by the university.

In addition to its downtown location, the building was also attractive to the university because it has withstood several hurricanes, Miller said. This makes it an ideal space for the unmanned aircraft control center in the event of a hurricane, as well as a safe location to protect the university's archives and special collections.

In spring 2023, the university launched fundraising efforts for phase two of the renovations, which will focus on the building's second floor. There, the university's Bell Library Special Collections and Archives department will house thousands of books, manuscripts and items documenting Corpus Christi and South Texas history, including records and surfboards from the Texas Surf Museum and a Hector P. Garcia collection.

Currently, the department can only house of portion of its 320 collections in the Bell Library. The rest is kept in outside storage in San Antonio and must be fetched if a researcher wants access to it. Among the documents stored off-site are the papers of congressmen Solomon P. Ortiz and John Young.

The price tag to build a space to properly house the archives and special collections is $2.4 million.

"We need what's called 'high-density storage', which are shelves that move back forth," Dean of University Libraries Catherine Rudowsky said. "Since they're compact you can fit a lot more of a collection into the space. We're building out a multi-purpose room where we hope to engage with the community and have events."

The department also needs cold storage to hold negatives and film, which won't break down or degrade when kept in a freezer, as well as a "quarantine room" to prevent mildew from spreading from new donations and space to continue the department's digitization efforts.

So far, the team has raised just over $300,000. It has also secured a fund-matching agreement from the National Endowment for the Humanities of up to $500,000.

Rudowsky said the goal is to move into the second floor of the new building in 2025.

"We want to interact with the community," Rudowsky said. "We want them to help us build that history and we want them to have access to that history."

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This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: A&M-Corpus Christi plans for five stories of drones, art and history