Bowlby Library in Waynesburg to be expanded
Bowlby Public Library in Waynesburg
The Eva K. Bowlby Library in Waynesburg plans to build an addition off of the north side of its garage on North West Street.
WAYNESBURG – An expansion project is underway at the Eva K. Bowlby Library in Waynesburg.
Library executive director Kathy McClure said the two-story addition will be built onto the north side of the garage of the existing building at 311 N. West St. The addition, along with the garage “conversion,” will make 1,134 square feet of new space for the library.
“The addition is going to be fairly large, but we still are in the planning part of this,” she said.
The downstairs of the addition will be a new media and community room that can seat at least 50 people and that the public would be able to reserve, including outside of library hours, McClure said. It will include a restroom and a kitchenette area.
“We have people who come in and use our small meeting room now, but 20 people is the maximum,” McClure said. “I think the community needs something like that, and we don’t have a lot of money to be able to go out and rent other spaces for our own programs.”
The second floor of the addition will be for their nonfiction, reference and Pennsylvania collections, leaving room for much needed seating areas, she said.
“We have a lot of people who use the library from the morning until late afternoon,” McClure said. “At one point, we had someone working on a cookbook here and we’ve had people bring their computers here to work. We just need more room.”
While the library has enough funds to get the project started, they will need to start fundraising for $500,000, McClure said.
“We’re hoping the community will come forward and support us in this,” she said.
A retired McMurray architect, Malcolm Moore, donated some of his time and work to put together a plan and blueprints for the addition, McClure said. Those blueprints were submitted to the Waynesburg Borough for zoning and building code approval.
“The borough just got everything in their hands last week,” McClure said.
McClure said regardless of whether they receive the permits for the addition, they will be “transforming” the garage into a larger community space.
She said the garage was part of a previous addition that was finished in 1987 and included the children’s room and the reference area. They initially built the garage for the bookmobile, which the Greene County Library System no longer runs.
“For 24 years I have said we need to do something with this garage,” she said.
The first fundraiser will be a Turkey Trot 5K race Nov. 18, with children’s activities and a registration fee that will go towards their expansion efforts.
Tonya Martin, president of the Eva K. Bowlby Library Association, said the expansion project will be discussed at their 5:30 p.m. meeting Sept. 25 at the library.