The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, take a tour of our new building, the Paul and Alice Baker Center for Public Media.

(Ian) When you're given a project this big, you have both the honor and the responsibility to get it right.

(Tom) StoryCorps listens to Southern Arizona.

(Kiplyn) We all know you can't judge a book by its cover.

You all know you can't look at someone and even pretend like you know their story.

(Tom) A local singer's debut album brings us back to the heart.

(Gabrielle) I don't know if I chose music.

I feel like music chose me.

(Tom) And the unusual story of this Tucson Tower.

(Demion) The inside, which again is this highly industrial space, which is such a juxtaposition to this beautiful, very romantic exterior.

Welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we're joining you from the Paul and Alice Baker Center for Public Media, which is Arizona Public Media's brand new facility.

It's been under construction here for several years at 36th and Kino.

This new building will open up a whole new range of opportunities for Arizona Public Media and all of Southern Arizona, just weren't possible in our old space.

Every time we're in the community or out on a shoot, people ask us about it.

So today we thought we'd answer those questions.

And joining us now is our colleague who's had a huge hand in the development of the Baker Center, our Chief Technology Officer, Ian McSpadden.

Ian, you have been a busy man for the last couple of years now.

You've been traveling, you've been checking out cutting-edge technology, researching, purchasing.

Tell us about the process and about what it's been like the last couple of years when there was just dirt on the ground here before we had this beautiful building.

Well, you know, it's been a long process, but it was done with intent and purpose.

You know, when we first had the idea that we wanted to build a new facility, it was going to the staff, to the community, discussing, you know, what does AZPM need to be future-ready for the next 60 years.

Moving forward, AZPM is an evolving organization.

You know, how we provide public media and engagement to our community will revolve around what kind of spaces we have to provide those.

And this is more than a television or radio studio.

We're going to be able to do so much more than we have been doing where we've been for the last umpteen years.

Yeah, the spaces were designed to be, again, flexible.

This studio space right here is not just to be used for a TV studio, but for performances, for debates.

You know, we have the ability to provide audience space.

We have AV and we have sound reinforcement.

Things that our old facilities didn't have, just the accessibility of this space is hugely different.

The first time I walked into this building not long ago after it was completed, but not filled in, I was blown away by the size and the scope and the functionality of it.

How big is this building?

It looks big, especially from the curb, because you see it as an entire unit.

This facility was actually designed to be as compact as possible to get as much as we could into the footprint of the land that we had available.

So we wanted to maximize the size of the spaces, but also put them in proximity where we have no real wasted spaces.

You'll see very few hallways.

A lot of spaces are very collaborative because people who work together on adjacent projects are actually physically adjacent now, where before they were a 10 minute walk down a hallway.

Ian, we all shop homes looking at square footage.

This enormous place.

What is the square footage and the functionality in here?

We pretty much doubled the square footage we had at Modern Languages.

So we had about 25,000 usable square feet there.

This is close to 60,000.

60,000.

Which includes some shell space on the third floor for future expansion.

We kind of built in extra space, not knowing in 5, 10, 20 years whether the organization would grow.

So it was important to have that.

You don't want to try to build on space to a building down the road.

The spaces we have that are different though are tremendous because our old facility again was repurposing spaces that had existed before for different organization uses.

Here we built a large sound stage.

It's multi-purpose.

We had a moderate sized TV studio there.

We have a radio performance studio here, which we didn't have there.

We have a classical and a jazz station.

To not be able to do live performances or recordings of our own was always a limitation that we've overcome here.

The general ability to bring people in is hugely different too because working in a facility on campus was a challenge in that getting on campus, say on game day or on a class day was challenging for the community.

Here we have a parking lot right next door.

It's very accessible into the building.

We have targeted spaces for the community that we couldn't have before.

So we have a community studio available.

We have a podcasting room available for the community to come in and engage with and learn the technology behind creating podcasts.

And we've got gathering spaces throughout the building and outside the building that weren't available at our old location.

When do you think we'll be open and what kinds of things can people expect when they finally get a chance to get in here?

Well, the community will first be coming in here in January 2026.

The Tucson Jazz Festival is holding one of their musical events here in this space.

Shortly after that we're actually doing a debate on public transportation here.

So for the Press Room we're actually going to hold kind of a live and recorded session in this space as well.

Our radio studios move in in February.

So you'll begin to hear Classical coming out of this facility in February.

NPR will come out in March.

And then the rest of our organizations, media production teams will begin to move over in early April.

So by the end of April most of AZPM's media operations will be coming out of this building.

Well, congratulations on a wonderful job.

Good luck in the home stretch, the fine tuning between now and the end of April and we'll look forward to full speed ahead.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ian.

One thing to know, the seats here at the new Baker Center are very comfortable.

You know, while the inside of the building is still being completed, we've already had visitors here.

Back in October of 2025, the StoryCorps mobile tour rolled into town and they set up shop right outside the building to listen to the stories of Tucson.

♪ ACOUSTIC MANDOLIN (Jada) I was actually working for a nonprofit in Atlanta and StoryCorps came and did some interviews with the staff there.

And I said, I wanna do that.

(Kiplyn) I initially, um, you know, started doing StoryCorps to capture the story of my parents and older relatives.

And then I started doing um, StoryCorps to kinda disprove the lack of African American fathers or Black fathers.

Cuz all of my friends are daddy's girls.

But, if you listen to just the general media or general culture, you wouldn't think that a Black girl could be a daddy's girl.

(Lee) My name is Lee J. Finn and this is my daughter, Karen Finn.

(Karen) I have two daughters and I think it's very important that they remember where they came from and the effort it took to give them the opportunities that they have today.

(Lee) My grandkids can look up what my life was when I was in the military, when I was in the Air Force.

(Karen) My father is three generations from slavery.

I am four generations and my daughter is five generations.

And I think it was really important to preserve, um, that history and his history being born in the South in 1935.

At a time where it seems like history seems to be optional, I wanted to make sure that we preserved our history and our truth.

(Lee) We should know something about our generation and they should know something about their self.

Actually, some of the things now have been so long till I forgot about them.

So, a lot of them coming back to me, you know, memories.

(Karen) My father really is a quiet and very humble person.

He did not wanna do this initially.

(Kiplyn) The majority of the people leave the booth on a high.

(Karen) He was really thrilled afterwards.

(Jada) Normally what happens is there's a partner that comes in and doesn't know what's going on.

All they know is they've been dragged there and when they start talking, generally we can't shut them up because everyone has a story to tell.

It's very interesting to watch things kind of unfold, people's perspective.

I think about an interview that I did a while ago with a former police officer from Hapeville, Georgia.

And he's telling this story when he was a youngster, they would break into a racetrack and they would race in cars around the track.

Someone doing that now would be something that he would be absolutely totally against.

He would villainize them.

And you could see him looking at, well, that's, that was an adolescent thing that I did.

And maybe I should have some grace.

(Kiplyn) This was a gray Saturday in Atlanta.

It was two blonde women, and the mother was exceptionally proud that her daughter was a freshman at Emory.

And so I'm thinking to myself, oh, this is gonna be another, you know, white bread story.

Okay, come on, let's, you know, go to the studio.

The youngest daughter who was there with her was a sickly kid.

This young lady had coded at least three or four times before she became a teenager.

And as the story progressed, the mother talked about the fact that she had had a breast cancer diagnosis and was in the midst of this breast cancer fight.

And she said that she knew how to fight because she watched her daughter fight so many times, to live.

I'm sorry.

I still get emotional about that story because we all three walked out crying.

And it just really hit home the fact that you cannot judge.

(Karen) I thought it was really important in this particular session, to really talk about the whole arc of his life and how it's covered American history.

From being born in the South in 1935, to joining the Air Force when the United States Air Force was a very young service, that whole history of 90 years, and there's so much more.

How our parents as an interracial couple were able to really build a strong family and give us opportunities that they could only dream of.

(Kiplyn) We all know you can't judge a book by its cover.

You all know you can't look at someone and even pretend like you know their story.

(Jada) And what you see is not necessarily what you get when you go deeper and allow people really to become vulnerable.

We are so much more alike as human beings than we are different.

♪ MUSIC FADES While the structure of the new Baker Center has been up for some time, it takes a long time and a lot of effort to build out the technology inside the building and meet a man at the epicenter of that.

Our colleague and Chief Engineer Greg Gutierrez, what has the last year been like for you at work?

Well, you know, I mean kind of leading up to getting the keys to the building.

We were in design meetings several times a week.

As soon as we got the keys to the building, it was just go, go, go from that point on.

You've been working in this honeycomb of contractors coming in from all different directions.

Miles of wires, I would imagine, and switches and gadgets and what have you.

Try to coordinate all that and keep it all moving forward.

That's got to be tough.

Yeah, we've had a lot of different wheels and motions.

So our primary contractor is Key Code Media.

They're the ones putting in the technology, running a lot of the cabling in each room.

In between all of that, we've had antennas, satellite dishes, microwave transmitters getting put on the roof with cranes and different contractors.

And now we're kind of at that stage where we're kind of hooking everything up and starting to get signals flowing to stuff.

That's right.

You mentioned satellite dishes will be on the roof of the new Baker Center.

Correct.

Yeah, we'll be using satellite dishes to receive incoming feeds from PBS, NPR stuff like that.

And then we'll be using microwaves, which are kind of like big white like drums on the roof that send those signals out that we're generating to all the transmitter sites and get us on the air that way.

There are capabilities in this brand new Baker Center that you won't find anywhere else in Southern Arizona.

That's right.

So all of our studios are built on kind of like floating floors where the walls and the floors don't touch each other.

So that isolates sound from them, which makes it a very unique space.

Not sure you'll find that really anywhere else in Arizona.

And we have ATMOS mixing studios, screening rooms, stuff like that that will really allow us to offer a unique service to the community.

Well, congratulations for your success in your role in this, Greg.

And I know a lot of people have leaned on you and will continue to do so, but lots to look forward to.

So all the best.

Thanks.

Appreciate it.

(Tom) If you're interested in seeing the new Baker Center for Public Media in person, we'll be hosting a taping of our program, "The Press Room" on January 22nd.

The live presentation will focus on RTA Next, the regional transportation authorities' new 20-year plan for Pima County that'll be decided by voters on March 10th.

For more information on The Press Room live, go to azpm.org/pressroom Now we bring you the story of a Tucson singer whose songs are an invitation about music as a path, the desert as a guide, and about a woman finding her way back again and again to what matters most.

Back to the heart.

[ DRUMMING ] [ PIANO PRACTICE ] (Gabby) I thought it'd be easiest if I just started with- ♪ GUITAR CHORDS So it'd be like that, you hear the little pickup notes.

[ HUMMING ] (Gabrielle) Can you imagine life without music?

I mean, it really is magical.

It's pitch and the beautiful melody, you know, and it's the rhythm.

And then it's the power of the lyrics, the words.

So it's language, communication.

♪ SINGING AND GUITAR I don't know if I chose music.

I feel like music chose me.

Like I just couldn't get away from it.

And playing music with other people especially jazz players, everybody listens and is communicating.

And when it's good on stage, everyone's flowing in this.

It's just one of the best parts of humanity.

♪ SLOW TUNE (Jim) I started working with Gabrielle probably 13 or 14 years ago.

She was in a band called the Silver Thread Trio.

Like all good Tucson bands, if you record an album, then you need to break up.

And so that's what they did.

Gabrielle's been kind of finding her way ever since.

(Thøger) Silver Thread Trio, I think that's how I met her.

We played a lot of different music together.

(Jim) She gradually found the group that she wanted to work with, Casey and Tuya, on bass and drums.

(Casey) I met Gabby through my friend Tuya Lund, who also played on the album, playing drum set for her, a lot of her tracks.

-(Jim) Maybe about four years ago, we started working on this album.

Not some kind of canned music with synthesizers and drum machines and stuff.

We have musicians that we all play together and we arrange the songs kind of in the studio.

-(Casey) I really like that when there's like a depth to a person and it's like reflected in their album or in their art.

The things that she thinks about and writes about are experiences that I can relate to.

(Thøger) She's a very spiritual person and picks up all the little signs from the world around her and writes songs about it.

♪ GUITAR STRUMMING [ FOOTSTEPS CRUNCHING ] (Gabrielle) Good girl, Daisy.

I've lived in Tucson almost my whole life.

As a kid, I do remember being very struck by the stars at night and the desert's prickly and mythical.

As I matured, something started to shift where I just recognized how much the open spaces of the land and sky have influenced me as an artist.

It's kind of at that point that my music started to turn towards the desert.

♪ GUITAR STRUMMING "She lives in the arroyo bed, dry in the summer heat.

She swims through your dreams at night when you're sleeping."

♪ She lives in the arroyo bed ♪ ♪ Drying in the summer heat ♪ ♪ She swims through your dreams at night ♪ ♪ When you're sleeping It's a song about the spirit of the desert, the mystery of this feminine energy that I felt visiting the Penicate Wilderness.

♪ SONG FINALE [ AUDIENCE CLAPPING ] (Gabby) All right, let me hear it.

(Mikaela) So there are a couple chords that I feel like sound a little bit strange, and I'll point them out to you when we get there, but it's like.

♪ GUITAR STRUMMING (Gabrielle) I was smart enough to get my education endorsement in college, I've always had a practical side.

[LAUGHS] I didn't just do the music side.

(Mikaela) It's this chord that seems a little bit strange to me, because I don't know what chord it is, but like, it- I don't know if it's- -It's like an A sus chord, wait, hold on, let me see.

(Gabrielle) I taught in the schools for years, I love teaching.

I'm just, really adore the families and students in my studio.

(Mikaela) I met her when I was five, and she was my music teacher there, and then I started taking private lessons with her, and I've been taking private lessons with her ever since.

And then this is just D-G-E-A.

-(Gabrielle) Yep, D-G-E.

♪ PIANO CHORD Right now, we're working on producing an EP for the end of my senior year.

I'm just recording music with her, and recording songs with her, and it used to be a lot more like about having me learn guitar and having me learn voice, but now we're moving more towards personal creation.

(Ava) I found Gabrielle when I was in high school.

It made me really wanna write songs as well.

♪ UKULELE AND SINGING I had some other inspirations, but she really pushed me to write my first song, which was "Sweet Watermelon."

Growing up as a young girl, she just understands what everything feels like, and I don't have to try really hard to be understood.

I never feel afraid to sing or try something in front of her.

There's no judgment.

♪ UKULELE AND SINGING (Jim) This is what Tucson's all about.

Community.

Coming together through music, and tonight, we're here to celebrate the release of "Back to the Heart."

This brand new full-length album from Gabrielle Pietrangelo.

[ AUDIENCE CHEERING ] ♪ FOLKSIE MUSIC ♪ Got a sad song to sing today ♪ (Gabrielle) Sometimes songs, music, art, they teach us how to like let the feeling come through.

It's so human.

♪ Maybe he was just a vagabond child ♪ I just had this moment of like self-doubt and like, "What's the point of it all?"

Like art for its own sake.

Just letting whatever your heart is processing.

It doesn't need to have more than just the practice of letting that come through as a worthy cause.

And I think I've taken that in deeper than I ever have, you know, with this album.

♪ Now I gotta take all this fruit ♪ ♪ and make a blueberry pie I hope that my music helps people feel their hearts and get in touch with like what's real to them.

And because that's where the real beauty is in life and I hope it helps them connect to their journey.

Gabrielle Pietrangelo everyone!

[ AUDIENCE CHEERING ] Standing 86 feet tall, the El Con Water Tower was built in 1928 just south of the lavish El Conquistador Hotel.

Its elegant Mission Revival design once greeted travelers from around the world, and today it remains a beloved landmark.

[Gentle Music] (Demion) The El Con Water Tower was built in 1928 by Martin Sherwin, who was one of the developers of the neighborhood that we're also in Colonia Solana.

[Car Passing] Colonia Solana was a 1920s suburban, very high-end development, attracting people to Tucson from the East Coast to become permanent residents here.

So when it was first built, it was just a classic water tower.

It was four long legs and about a 50,000 gallon tank on the top.

Over time, because of deterioration, there were multiple efforts to tear the water tower down.

And multiple times, neighbors and community members came together to stop it.

[Gentle Music] The structure was created to evoke this sort of Spanish revival flavor that was very popular in the 1920s.

The hotel across the street, the El Conquistador Hotel which was torn down decades later, was built in that classic style and this had always had a reflection of that and people often assumed that it was the water tower for the hotel.

It was not, but it retained the name the El Con Water Tower.

[Rising Music] In 1932, Roy Place was hired to encase the water tower in this Spanish revival facade, which you see today.

And it became sort of a landmark for this part of the city.

Roy Place was a major architect who came to Tucson during this period in the interwar years and then went on to design some of the most iconic buildings of that period.

Architecturally, it's on a square base and it has a cupola on the top with these beautiful windows.

You sort of, people imagine that it would be like a viewing station or that there would be these grand stairs that would lead to the top to be able to stand on the balconies and look out.

But in fact, there's still the old 50,000-gallon water tank in the middle of the cupola at the top.

[Piano Music] The building has gone through a number of renovations and restorations.

It was painted about six or seven years ago by the city of Tucson.

And there were open houses at the time where the public was able to take a tour and see the inside, which again is this highly industrial space, which is such a juxtaposition to this beautiful, very romantic exterior.

They hired Josias Joesler, another significant architect, to design the weather vane of a miner and his donkey, which was sort of a nod to the mining traditions of the region.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the early 1980s and in the early 90s, it was designated a City of Tucson landmark.

Buildings like the El Con Water Tower are part of our cultural fabric.

They're part of the visual beauty of our city, and they became these sort of beacons and icons of how the community was developing.

Today they are sort of an artifact of that era, but they are so charming and they're part of what makes Tucson unique.

But the story of the water tower isn't just about a pretty icon, it's also about the resiliency of our city.

To me, it really represents this sort of power of the community to stand up and say these places matter and how we can come together and ensure that they're preserved for the future.

[music] Thank you for joining us from here at the brand new Paul and Alice Baker Center for Public Media.

We can't wait for you to see it.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you again next week.