Love's labor emerges at Center in the Square 

Aquariums, iPads and flat screen televisions. Chandeliers and sculpted ceilings. Floor tiles arranged to make the shape of a giant butterfly. A skylight with colored glass in irregular shapes that seems to match the late Dorothy Gillespie’s aluminum sculptures ascending toward it.

There’s no question that more than $27 million in renovations has transformed Center in the Square.

At a Tuesday morning news conference, Center President and General Manager Jim Sears talked about how the days are gone for good when all a visitor saw in Center’s atrium were two volunteers seated at a desk.

[VIDEO: Hear firsthand about the latest from Center in the Square.]

“This project was a great labor of love,” said David Bandy , president of Roanoke architecture firm Spectrum Design, which designed the building. Flourishes such as allowing the science museum’s new butterfly garden to rise through the roof had to be balanced with conservation of historical features to meet requirements for tax credits, he said.

Center has less than two weeks to go until its May 18 grand reopening, with a preview Grand Affair gala scheduled for Saturday. Though on schedule and on budget, the project’s hectic pace to put on finishing touches has become more frantic than ever.

The final count for the number of aquariums Center will care for on its first floor turns out to be six (it was originally four). In addition to the 5,500-gallon living coral reef aquarium, two smaller ones for jellyfish, one for sea horses and one for freshwater fish, there will be another that holds turtles.

At the news conference, Center announced a new corporate sponsor. The new box office accessible from both the atrium and the street has been named the McDonald’s Box Office in honor of the Southwest Virginia Operators Association, a co-op of 11 McDonald’s franchise owners who run a total of 59 restaurants. Co-op director of marketing Sally Scott declined to discuss the finances involved other than to say it’s a 15-year commitment on the part of McDonald’s.

[MAP: See where everything is in the redesigned building.]

Some other things are still in the works, such as setting a ticket price that offers admission to all the museums, said Center vice president of development Julee Goodman .

Also, Center hasn’t yet found a tenant for its rooftop restaurant, though there are discussions under way with three prospects, Sears said.

Center will charg e admission for its Family Day of Discovery grand opening on May 18. Goodman said that the $15 admission for adults ($10 for children 3 to 17) is a bargain because it covers all the museums and the many extra activities taking place that day. Ticket sales will also give the museums a financial boost .

Here’s a look at what visitors can expect from each museum.

Harrison Museum of African American Culture

The Harrison Museum’s space on the second floor bustled with activity Tuesday as the all-volunteer nonprofit prepared to reopen with five new exhibitions, the first shows the museum has held in a space of its own since it left the former Harrison Elementary School in December 2009.

Dianne Smith, a New York artist with a studio in Harlem, worked on setting up her site-specific installation, “No Limits,” by the museum entrance, using crumpled butcher paper and rope to cover corners. Roanoke Times photographer Stephanie Klein-Davis will have a photography exhibition, “The African Diaspora in Roanoke.”

The panels of a traveling exhibition, “Passage to Freedom: Secrets of the Underground Railroad,” unpacked but not yet arranged in order, filled one wing.

Assembled in collaboration with Virginia Tech, “The Oral History Project” will allow visitors to use iPads to watch oral history videos told by Roanoke residents, as well as graduates of the Christiansburg Institute in Blacksburg, one of the earliest all-black educational institutions in Virginia. There will also be a show by Roanoke oil painter Antoinette Hale .

“We’re interested in presenting art as part of the culture portion of the museum,” said board president Charles Price . The museum intends to have all the new exhibitions ready by the grand opening. Price said many volunteers have stepped up to help, with anywhere from five to 60 people working in the museum on a given day. “It’s been fantastic.”

The museum’s $2.7 million fundraising campaign for its exhibitions is still ongoing, he said.

History Museum of Western Virginia

The History Museum, run by the Historical Society of Western Virginia, won’t be completely ready by the May 18 reopening, but its staff plans to have the permanent gallery on the third floor set up by May 11.

Called “Migrations at the Crossroads of History,” the gallery will have displays that range through Southwest Virginia history from the time before European settlers to 20th-century developments in Roanoke. On Tuesday, the displays weren’t fully assembled.

The first exhibition to occupy the museum’s rotating gallery, also on the third floor, will open June 7. “An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia,” assembled by the Virginia Historical Society, will tie into the Civil War sesquicentennial.

The museum has an additional space on Center’s second floor, the George and Louise Kegley Special Collections Gallery, that will eventually hold nine small exhibitions assembled from the Historical Society’s vast collection of artifacts. A number of large pieces familiar from the museum’s prior displays are already there, including a horse-drawn carriage and an antique safe.

Sy Hughes , development director of the Historical Society, noted that the museum lost about 300 members after moving to its temporary location in the Shenandoah Hotel, but those members are renewing again. The museum’s $1.5 million fundraising campaign continues, he said.

Science Museum of Western Virginia

Jim Rollings, the science museum’s executive director, said Tuesday the museum hopes to have half of its new galleries assembled by Saturday and three-quarters by May 18. When completed, the museum will host five new galleries and a space for traveling exhibitions.

Yet the museum’s highly touted new attraction, the butterfly garden, will be ready. On Tuesday, some newly hatched painted lady butterflies fluttered in a plastic tank, while monarch s had begun to emerge from their pupae in the museum’s emergence case.

Derek Kellogg , the museum’s lead animal care specialist, said that the museum won’t be able to house any tropical varieties until it gets the needed U.S. Department of Agriculture permits. In the meantime, the garden will be stocked with butterflies that don’t require USDA approval.

The museum did have a nifty new gizmo in place Tuesday — the OmniGlobe. A new feature in the museum’s weather gallery, the large globe with an internal projector can show dozens of representations of a planet’s surface, including animated weather patterns, the evolution of Earth’s continents over millions of years, or the surface of Mars. The OmniGlobe exhibit was underwritten by the Cartledge Charitable Foundation, Steel Dynamics vice president and general manager Joe Crawford and Virginia Tech Provost Mark McNamee and his wife Carole.

As for the science museum’s fundraising campaign, “we’re pretty much complete,” Rollings said.

However, the science museum will be likely be launching a new campaign for up to $600,000 in the fall to upgrade and reopen its planetarium.

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