Renovated East Meadow Library Holds ‘Soft’ Opening

EAST MEADOW — A ground-floor community room, a reconfigured entrance hall and basement, and a reading garden are among the new features of the East Meadow Library.

The library held a “soft” opening Sept. 23, more than four years after residents approved a capital bond to reconstruct the aging building, an ongoing project. A grand opening is slated for 2022.

The refurbished main floor sports a more open atmosphere than before, with shorter, bleached-wood shelves for easier access to books and multiple skylights providing more natural illumination.

“The first reaction I’m getting from patrons when they walk in is that it looks so big,” said Carol Probeyahn, the library director.

The spacious main floor also has more padded chairs but fewer seats and tables than the library initially ordered due to CDC COVID guidelines for social distancing.

“Once the COVID issues are settled, there will be a fuller experience,” Probeyahn said of the sparser furnishings.

The lone addition to the library’s former blueprints is the new community room that adds 6,313 square feet to the building’s existing 39,600 footprint. The room has 230 seats on a stadium-like slope that offers clearer sightlines, a projector screen, and programmable quadrant lighting. The projector still needs to be installed along with the sound and hearing-enhancement systems.

Outside the community room’s main doors is a new long, wide hallway featuring short book and magazine cases, padded chairs and bathrooms, an area that was reconfigured at the building’s entrance. The hall also has an elevator that connects to the basement.

The downstairs, the site of the former community room, was also completely reconfigured. It has a “pop library” stocked with best-selling books by authors such as James Patterson and David Baldacci, travel books, audiobook CDs and music CDs. An adjacent but still unfinished conference room will serve as a “Makers Space,” which will feature a 3D printer for making crafts and the like. A folding divider can split the room into two, and classes, workshops and other programs will be held there for patrons of all ages.

“It’s more of an enhancement of what we’re already doing and the ability to have it grow, and now we have a space for crafts and a creative space,” Probeyahn said of the conference room.

Upstairs on the main floor is a new, larger children’s room with a roomier story hour room, single study rooms with computers, a family bathroom and a skylight. The children’s room connects to an outdoor reading garden with benches and a tall concrete wall that blocks off Front Street.

Other new features upstairs are a group study room and a single study room. Three existing single study rooms and the adjacent young adult room from the former facility remain intact.

The building also includes upgraded electrical, lighting and HVAC systems.

With increasingly more patrons using the aging library, which was built in 1959, the administrators and board trustees decided the facility needed an upgrade. In March 2017, residents voted in a referendum to approve a $14.6 million capital bond to renovate the building.

“Patrons ask me all the time: why did you have to do this? And my easy answer is that we now have 400,000 people who visit the library every year but there is the same plumbing,” said Jude Schanzer, director of library public relations and programming.

Hicksville-based architect Peter Gisolfi Associates and Mark Design Studios, a construction design company, were hired to renovate the building. Reconstruction started in July 2019, after which library operations shifted to one-third of the building while the remainder was gutted down to the metal studs.

During the COVID-related closures starting in March 2020, the building was closed and construction was halted until July of last year. The library initially held virtual programs online and offered material holds at Speno Park, and later started a curbside pickup service at Samanea (the former Source Mall) on Old Country Road in Westbury.

“We never actually stopped serving people after the library facility was closed,” Probeyahn said.

During the library’s final full year of operation before reconstruction, 2017 and 2018, the number of yearly patron visits to the library was 345,000, and circulation of materials was 343,750. Probeyahn said those numbers typically rise during the first full year in a newly refurbished building, as more residents and out-of-towners are curious to visit a new facility. But as the library prepares to return to in-person programming, COVID-related regulations for social distancing will likely keep those numbers down.

“In a space that holds 230 people,” Schanzer said of the community room, “we are figuring that we’re going to get 50 percent of that in. So, we can only accept less.”

Schanzer said the library’s first post-reconstruction exhibit, involving the Space Science Institute and the Cradle of Aviation Museum, is in the works for the spring or summer 2022. The library expects to hold its grand opening at that time.

For more information about the library, call 794-2570 x 005.