More than a dozen years after setting expansion plans in motion, a Bar Harbor library is on pace to complete an $11 million addition this year.
Until now, the appearance of Jesup Memorial Library had hardly changed since it was founded in 1911, when motor vehicles were not even allowed in the scenic coastal town. While the needs of libraries have changed dramatically — from the programs they offer to the technology that helps them function — the Jesup library continued as it always had, with only one bathroom and no disability access from one floor to the next.
Now, with the contemporary addition set to be completed by the end of the year, the library will roughly double from its current size of 11,500 square feet. The building will go from mainly a 19th-century concept of housing books and periodicals, to one where wheelchairs can easily move among all three floors via an elevator, groups of people can gather and digital technology is readily accessible.
“We’re doing a complete 180,” said Matt Delaney, the library director. “This building will allow us to adapt and change with the times.”
The library organization has not been resistant to change, but its ability to adapt has been constrained by the property’s physical boundaries and the structure’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places, which can limit what kind of changes can be made. Those hurdles were greatly lowered in 2012, when the library bought an abutting property at the corner of Mount Desert and School streets.
Public internet access has been available for years at the Jesup, but workspaces where people can sit with laptops have been limited, and even outlets where patrons can plug in devices are hard to come by, Delaney said. When the library does host events, furniture has to be carefully rearranged in the library’s two-story main room to make space for chairs. That makes it difficult for regular patrons to browse the stacks while the event is happening.
With the three-story addition, the library will significantly expand its space for children and teens, add five bathrooms accessible to people with disabilities and provide increased computer access and workspaces for people with laptops. The addition will include a community room that can hold 120 people and be accessed after the rest of the library closes for the day, and it will have a makerspace equipped with a 3D printer and digital media access.
“We’re not really adding a whole lot of shelving” for books, Delaney said, though the library’s circulation has increased in recent years. “The big need is for all these other functions.”
And, for the first time, the library will have its own dedicated parking behind the building off School Street with spaces for up to 12 cars, he said.
The nonprofit library had been mulling over how it might make some improvements to its physical needs when the property next door came up for sale 13 years ago. After buying the lot, the library rented out the former house on it for a few years and then, in 2016, started raising funds and developed specific plans to expand.
In 2019, it tore down the house and started groundwork on the property, which included making drainage improvements to the first floor of the existing building, which is below ground level along Mount Desert Street.
Then COVID spread around the world in 2020, bringing pretty much everything to a temporary halt and causing a price spike in construction materials. The library had yet to begin actual work on the addition, and so used the pandemic pause to solicit feedback via Zoom from focus groups.
The library was committed to building the addition with cross-laminated structural timbers made from New England-grown eastern hemlock, but this was not a significant issue in making the expansion longer to complete, Delany said. The library did have to extend its fundraising campaign in order to meet the project’s higher price, but made some tweaks to the design to save on costs and to include more space for people with laptops — the demand for which has remained high since the pandemic.
“We had to raise a lot of money to pull this off,” Delaney said, but there has been ample buy-in from local residents and the business community. “People had confidence this project was going to happen.”
