Calder banners in the Free Library Central Branch. Photo at Philly.com.

It’s always so great to dig around in your attic and find that binder of baseball cards that you thought was lost forever or that concert poster from The Grateful Dead show you went to in 1975.

Well, the city apparently experienced something similar with the discovery of some large banners in a storage room in City Hall:

For more than two decades, they’ve been out of public view, feared lost, feared destroyed, feared - at the least - grotesquely faded or damaged.

But from a cluster of nondescript plastic tubs stuck in an out-of-the-way storage room in the bowels of a Center City office tower, they were ferreted out at last, still bright and essentially unmarred.

And now, for the first time since the mid-1980s, the vanished Alexander Calder banners - part of one of the greatest public art legacies in Philadelphia history - will be on public view until March at the Central Branch of the Free Library on Logan Square.

The banners were found five or six years ago and only recently made their way to this display.  Inky culture writer Stephan Salisbury’s story of why it took so long is an interesting lesson in the laws and regulations that guide the use of public art.

So, while Philadelphia won’t be getting that Calder Museum for the Parkway any time soon, at least some of the famed artists work will get a proper showing.