Macomb County's first Carnegie library is now its art center

The columned stone building at 125 Macomb Place in downtown Mount Clemens was paid for, in part, by Andrew Carnegie. The steel baron who became one of the great library givers put up $17,000 toward it, and when it opened to readers in early 1905 it was the very first Carnegie library in Macomb County — one of more than 1,600 he funded across the country.

It served as the city’s public library for the better part of seventy years. By 1969 the books had moved to a bigger building over on Cass Avenue, and the old Carnegie library sat empty with a date with the wrecking ball. That’s usually how these stories end.

This one didn’t. Three women from the local art association — Bea Wright, Gretchen Thompson, and Phyllis Wickens — rallied the town to save the building and put it to new use. The same year the books left, the place reopened as a community art center, gallery walls going up where the stacks had been.

It picked up its current name later, after the Gebran and Suzanne Anton family of Grosse Pointe gave the money for a roughly $1.7 million addition and renovation that wrapped up in 2007. The expanded building became the Anton Art Center, and the 1904 Carnegie original eventually landed its own listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Walk in today and you’ll find rotating exhibits, classes, and a gift shop full of work by Michigan artists, all under the same Neo-Classical roof where Mount Clemens once came to borrow books. It’s the kind of reuse that beats a parking lot every time — a building that traded one set of patrons for another and never went dark for long.