CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Another major step in the construction of a multi-million dollar project for the downtown Charleston library has been taken.
The pouring of concrete took place Wednesday on the Sky Bridge connecting the Kanawha County Public Library (KCPL) to the Summer Street Parking Garage. Following the pouring of the concrete, five KCPL employees who have been employed 35 years or longer, made handprints in the concrete to commemorate.
Elizabeth Fraser, Head of Reference Services at the library was one of those five employees.
“We have worked and planned for a new library for the public for a long time. To see it come to fruition, it’s really cool. You work really hard and to see something tangible is icing on the cake,” she told MetroNews.
The Sky Bridge is a part of the $32 million renovation of KCPL’s iconic downtown library building. In addition to the Sky Bridge, the project will add 28,000 square feet of new space to the original building, along with additional community rooms, new technology, an expanded Children’s floor, a small café, and more, a release said.
The square footage of the facility will go from 53,000 square feet to 81,000 square feet. Fraser said she was excited about the possibilities.
“In the children’s department, they are going to have dedicated program rooms. You can do messy crafts and things you couldn’t do before. In the reference department, we’re going to be able to build a neat West Virginia room where we’ll be able to digitize room to be able to share with the public,” Fraser said of some of the new additions.
The work remains on schedule to be completed in December 2021. The final beams for the project were put into place in November 2020.
In June 2020, library officials opened a location in the Charleston Town Center for a branch while the downtown location was closed. The location at the mall became even more vital as the pandemic was in its early stages.
Fraser said the pandemic showed the different ways a library can serve a community and believes the new location will see an increase in foot traffic in December.
“During the pandemic, we did curbside service. We did reference and got people signed up for library cards so they could use e-books and audiobooks during the lockdown.”