Imagine a Community Living Room - Your New Library
Brunswick is a community on the move-and a great place to move to
Proposed floor plan of 4118 Brunswick Road
The size of our current space is overlaid in green
With a population of 12,000 and growing, incomes greater than the State average and housing costs that are lower, Brunswick is a great place to live. This area enjoys healthy residential and commercial development while retaining its charming rural character. Young families come for our excellent, well-supported schools and athletics programs. Seniors stay for the quality of life.
It can't get any better than this! Or can it?
The residents of Brunswick share many traditional values but we lack a place where we can come together as a community-a "living room" in our town. Consider a place that could be
- an intergenerational place to meet your neighbors, available to everyone, and easily accessible from all parts of town.
- a place where people can meet with others who share common interests, where you can gauge the pulse of the community, and learn what is going on.
- a place that excites the imagination, enhances education, and adds vitality to our community life.
The New Brunswick Community Library-Your Community Living Room
Progress, October 16
Imagine a library with shelves brimming with books classic and contemporary, with computers that access a world of knowledge and plenty of comfortable seating that invites you to stay and relax. A place where people with mobility challenges and parents with strollers can enjoy full access. A place that has appropriate spaces for public meetings, reading groups, tutoring, literacy programs, cultural programs, and local art exhibits. A place to delight our children with story hours and cultivate the love of literature through summer reading programs. A place for teens to meet and grow in a wholesome environment. Where you can relax and read or borrow a book.
Above all, imagine a library that retains the qualities we all value and adds so much more.
Our current Library-a treasure past its prime In the 1980s, several visionary community members seized the opportunity to offer a reading center. A decade later, this space became the Garfield Library. With the addition of more books and shelving, it was chartered as the Brunswick Community Library in 2002.
Our library has been a model of efficiency-a valued resource known for helpful librarians and staff. It is the local connection-where you can get a passport, tax forms, as well as any book, CD, DVD or video available through the Upper-Hudson Library System. You can even download books from our website. We've offered story hours, reading groups and a wonderful summer reading program but our potential has been seriously restricted by the lack of space.
We now have 2,300 library users who visit throughout the year and circulation is up by 30% since 2000. Our community has outgrown our building. As a result, the State of New York has put us on notice that our library's charter is in jeopardy for lack a space, shelving and seating.
Acknowledging these challenges and the inability to expand in our current location, the Trustees explored numerous alternatives until an ideal location became available-easily accessible from every corner of town, with green space, parking and room for expansion in the future.
A Community Investment - You are invited to join
A capital campaign to raise money will allow the library to pay off the mortgage on the new building and complete the renovations necessary to transform the building into a 21st century library. This investment will quadruple the square footage of our current library, increase our book and meeting space, and open the door for program enhancement.
Our new space offers a multitude of opportunities to grow with Brunswick. With an additional investment from the community, we have the ability to expand to meet future needs.
To ensure success of the campaign we will need Brunswick businesses, families and individuals, to participate. When a member of the campaign team invites you to support the library, we encourage you to thoughtfully consider your part in our Community Living Room…our Library.
And in the future, we hope you will join us in working for a change in our library charter to become a tax-based library. Stable and secure funding will enable us to make full use of our new space, offering all of the exciting programming that our community requires and desires.
To learn more, please contact Campaign Planning Committee Chair, Ms. Pat Carlson at or the library director, Ms. Julie Zelman at .
