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The bright blue columns always felt a little strange on this stretch of Main Street, and the reason may be what they are attached to. The Science Center lives inside an 1878 dry-goods building whose cast-iron façade still carries the old “Carter Dry Goods” name up top. The museum did not move in until 1977, and the blue-columned entrance is a much later intervention than the building itself. So the oddness is real: a splash of modern museum architecture planted onto a nineteenth-century storefront.