Interior design: 3-D model details Lithgow renovation plan
AUGUSTA — Community leaders and the public oohed and aahed over a three-dimensional model of a Lithgow Library that could be.
Featuring three gables along State Street and a rear facade that mirrors the front entrance, the model and interior pictures were the highlights of a public display of renovation plans presented Thursday at the city-owned library.
“It sort of replicates the dimensions and size of the original building so it doesn’t overwhelm it,” said Elizabeth Pohl, library director.
The design will double the library’s interior space and will require $9 million to fund. The City Council is expected to approve a bond package covering construction costs that could be presented to voters in November.
The Friends of Lithgow Library plan to raise additional money for other items.
“We’re looking to put together a Team Lithgow,” said Ansley Sawyer, a dentist who is treasurer of the Friends, “the same way that Team Cony did for the high school.”
He said the group has already received its first small donation tagged for the building expansion, “and we haven’t even asked anybody yet.”
The Friends group has raised money to restore stained glass transom-style windows in the Reading Room, which bear medallions with imprints of 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century printing houses.
Rae Ann French, a district court judge who is heading the building committee, gave a brief tour to show the crowding inside the 111-year-old public building.
“The photocopier, the learn-to-read space and the adult education area are all crowded in a small area,” she said.
In the 1979 addition that holds the fiction collection, books pack tall shelves and spill over onto the window sills. A double row of audiobooks lines the middle of another room near the circulation desk.
Thursday evening, dozens of people stood around the displays and helped themselves to cookies and juice in the ornately painted reading room. They waited for a presentation by library officials and trustees on the plans for the new construction.
A few feet away, in other sections of the library, people browsed on computers, checked out books and worked on projects.
French said almost 140,000 people visited the library and borrowed 165,000 items in 2006.
“The experience with renovated libraries is that (those numbers) double and, in Auburn’s experience, the use of the children’s room tripled,” she said.
Betsy Cook, co-owner of the Senator Inn & Spa, asked about whether patrons would be able to eat in the library. Pohl showed her a “cafe” area marked on the plans.
“We have not worked out the details, but we may be able to do something,” Pohl said.
City Councilor David Rollins, who is on the building committee, balanced on crutches as he made his way around the model of the building.
“This is a great opportunity for the city to take our community to a new level, to say we’re on board with literacy and we want everyone to interact in this environment,” he said.
The refurbished, expanded building would have the main entrance and parking on the Oak Street side, and a community room area that could be accessed even when the library is closed.
The new plans show a markedly different exterior than that envisioned under another plan proferred in 2001.
“The other plan was a box, and this is so pleasing aesthetically,” said Susan LaCasse, head of the library trustees.
“Every time I walk in here and look at the stained-glass windows, it’s amazing,” said S. Kirk Studstrup, a library trustee and superior court justice. “They just don’t make them like that anymore. The challenge is to save the old building and update it.”
source: http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com
