The District of Columbia Public Library will announce the architect chosen to restore and renovate its Georgetown branch this afternoon, according to Archie Williams, an Intergovernmental Affairs Specialist for DCPL. The library building, located at 3260 R Street, was gutted by an accidental fire last spring.
No plans have been made regarding the designs of the new library, Nancy Davenport, DCPL’s Interim Director of Library Services, said, but the architect will make use of the building’s exterior.
“He’ll work with the existing shell and design a modern library inside that shell, and perhaps enlarge it,” Davenport said, adding that DCPL will hold several community meetings where residents can talk about what features they would like to see in the new building.
Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Bill Skelsey envisions the new library as a more relevant and welcoming community institution than the old one was.
“The community will probably want public meeting space for the community as a whole, more technology and more computers, places for people to come and gather and meet so it has somewhat of a social function,” he said. “People would go in, they’d look, they’d see what a tired and ineffective facility it was, and they wouldn’t go back.”
The remnants of the library’s collection were set to be stored at a temporary site on Wisconsin Avenue near Glover Park this past October, but Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission rejected the DCPL plan—which would have kept the volumes there until Georgetown library’s projected re-opening in 2010—for being too far away from Georgetown residences, according Skelsey. He said that the location of the temporary site would be the ANC’s primary criterion for approval.
“We were trying to find sites that had frontage on a major boulevard that was accessible to public transportation, that had approximately 5,000 square feet of usable library space,” Williams said of the Glover Park site. “We also like to make sure that the facility that will house the interim has plenty of light, hopefully natural light.”
The DCPL is now negotiating with various community groups within the District to use space on the field outside of the Jelleff Boys and Girls Club, located on T Street off of Wisconsin Avenue. The temporary library would be housed in 5,000-square-foot trailer facilities.
The Boys and Girls Club is the ANC’s top choice for a temporary library location, according to student ANC Commissioner Jenna Lowenstein (COL ‘09).
“It’s really accessible for everybody and it’s also a great use of Jelleff, which is … a gem of the neighborhood,” she said.
Williams, though, said that the plan to use the Club space had not been finalized, despite extensive negotiations.
The library currently operates from a bookmobile permanently parked outside of the Boys and Girls Club. The bookmobile offers the full range of DCPL services, although only a small number of books are kept on-site, according to Davenport.
The April 30, 2007 fire was allegedly caused by negligence with a heat gun used to strip lead paint from the building’s exterior during renovations.
In August, the District of Columbia filed a claim for $13 million against the contractor that was performing the renovating, Dynamic Corporation of Hyattsville, Maryland.
Philip Evans, who is representing Dynamic Corporation, said that no action had been taken in the matter because of Dynamic’s ongoing appeal of the claim.
