California Tower will open to public Jan 1.

Every day, there are three questions visitors ask at the admissions desk of the Museum of Man in Balboa Park.

Tourists wonder: Is this a church? Locals inquire: Is the Tortilla Lady still here? And everybody wants to know: Can we go up in the tower?

It’s not a church; the California Building, which houses the Museum of Man, is one of the original buildings from the 1915 Panama-California Exposition.

And the Tortilla Lady, Diana Montoya, retired after 40 years of service in 2007.

Interactive: Explore the view from the tower

But as of Jan. 1, just in time for the centennial of the 1915 Exposition in Balboa Park, you’ll be able to go up the tower.

With the city’s Historical Review Committee and Structural Review Committee signing off on the project this week, the museum received the final permits to complete the renovations and improvements necessary to open the California Tower for the first time since 1935.

“I don’t think you can overstate the importance of this,” said Micah Parzen, the Museum of Man’s CEO, who expects opening the tower will draw a new audience to the museum. “We believe it will be absolutely transformational, not only for the Museum of Man, but really for all of Balboa Park.”

The California Tower, since it was built in 1915 to mark the entry to the Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park, has become an iconic structure in San Diego, appearing everywhere from the flip side of the 1935 “San Diego half dollar” to the 2004 movie, “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.” If the city has an unofficial logo, it’s the California Tower.

“Built to signify the spirit of optimism, opportunity and promise of San Diego in 1915, the California Tower remains a beacon of hope and progress for our entire region, in addition to being our primary architectural emblem,” said Charlotte Cagan, executive director of the Balboa Park-based San Diego History Center. “Its rehabilitation is a significant symbol of the rejuvenation of Balboa Park as a whole.”

The museum has more than $1 million of the $3 million it needs to fund the project, largely from a grant from the Legler Benbough Foundation. With the project now approved, Parzen said he is confident the institution can raise the remaining $2 million by selling naming rights to 76 of the tower’s steps (for $5,000 each) and 20 benches (for $25,000), and memberships to the “Tower Society” ($50,000 to $1 million). The institution will also conduct a crowd-sourced, online fund drive to involve smaller donors.

Approximately $1 million of the funds raised, primarily from the Tower Society, will go toward creating an endowment-like fund that would cover the operations and upkeep of the tower; the balance will go for planning and construction costs, which mostly involve safety features like new lighting, replacing or modifying railings and creating a virtual tower tour for those physically unable to make the eight-story climb.

“This is a project that has been three years in the making, but really 80 years in the imagining,” said Parzen. “The tower had been open from 1915 to 1935. We don’t know why it was closed, but the museum has thought about trying to reopen it for decades. And for one reason or another, it never happened — until now.”

Part of the challenge was likely the museum’s habitual financial issues, which kept it operating for years in survival mode. Parzen, an anthropologist and lawyer, made some unpopular decisions after he took over the institution in 2010, including cutting staff and closing the gift shop, but he’s stabilized the institution, revitalized its programming and focused on a mission of “inspiring human connections by exploring the human experience.”

The museum, which now has an operating budget of $3.2 million, attracted roughly 180,000 visitors in 2013, according to Parzen, and is running in the black for the second straight year.

“A lot of things we’ve been doing over the last year have been about building capacity so we can successfully pull this off,” Parzen said. “We’ve just hired our first volunteer manager in I don’t know how many years, because we know volunteers will play an important part in the success of this project.”

Given safety concerns and city restrictions, visitors will not be able to go up in the tower unaccompanied. The museum is planning on conducting 10 tower tours a day, starting at 10 a.m. and each lasting approximately 45 minutes.

The tours will have a maximum of 12 visitors, plus two guides, with one of the guides likely being a volunteer.

Visitors will need to sign a liability waver, and the tour includes a 10-minute safety briefing. Tour guides will offer commentary on the tower, the building and the park’s history during the ascent to the tower’s eighth floor, where visitors will have 10-15 minutes to explore the unparalleled views that extend from Mexico to the Pacific Ocean and beyond.

The tower has two additional levels, but those will be off limits to the public. The city and the museum have deemed the climb to the ninth floor on a spiral staircase too dangerous to open to the public, and the 10th floor houses speakers for the tower’s carillon.

Visitors who are unable physically make the climb will have access to an “equivalent facilitation experience,” which features an 80-inch, viewer-controlled HD screen linked to cameras on the tower, and will also have a version of the spoken portion of the tour available as well.

The museum is installing an online ticketing system that will allow visitors to make reservations for the tower tours. Although the exact charges are still being discussed, Parzen said the cost of a tower ticket would likely be a $10 “upcharge” on the museum’s general admission of $12.50.

As it is now set up, the museum could handle approximately 43,000 visitors to the tower a year.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Parzen said. “Are we going to sell out online, or is most of the demand going to be at the ticket booth? If we are extraordinarily successful, we may open early and do tower tours or stay late for sunset tours.

“We’ve just focused on making it accessible to the public for the first time and getting a model in place that we think will work well. We’ll continue to refine it over time.”