Sugar Grove finally breaks ground for new library

Sugar Grove library officials broke ground Saturday for an $8 million construction project approved by voters more than three years ago.

The ceremony took place under a soft rain, which Perry Clark of the Sugar Grove Economic Development Corp. said was fitting, given the stormy history of the project.

"The library has weathered the storm," Clark said, "and today is the day they've been waiting for a long time."

Slated to wrap up in fall 2009, construction is expected to begin in June on the new, 25,500-square-foot library at 125 S. Municipal Drive, just south of Route 30. The library district paid $985,000 for the 5-acre parcel last November after years of difficulties in choosing a site.

Library board President Art Morrical called the groundbreaking an "important milestone" for the library and "another chapter" in its 46-year history.

"Libraries change not only individual lives, but entire communities," he said.

Since the early 1980s, the Sugar Grove Public Library has called home a 6,000-square-foot house at Snow and Main streets.

Additional space needs for materials, programs and a growing population were the impetus for a construction referendum in November 2004.

Kirk Albinson of the library's architect and engineering firm, Cordogan, Clark & Associates, said the one-story building will include a coffee shop, public meeting areas, a quiet reading room with a fireplace, a teen area and children's reading room.

There also will be a covered porch attached to the front of the building, where folks can settle into a rocking chair with a book or magazine, as well as green space behind the library for outdoor activities.

Albinson, whose company also built the Glen Ellyn Public Library, described the building design as "rural agrarian," with stonework around the base of the structure, vaulted ceilings and exposed, laminated timber. It's being built with room for expansion.

"I think it's unique to what the community was looking for," said project manager Therese Thompson, who works for Cordogan, Clark.

The groundbreaking, attended by U.S. Rep. Bill Foster and numerous other elected officials, was coupled with the announcement of a $370,000 donation to the library district from resident Anthony J. Rich.

The Rich family also almost donated the site for the library, with Jerry Rich, the town's most prominent resident who made his fortune designing a computer system for Wall Street, offering a location on Main Street that in the end was passed over for the bigger site being used.

The donation, fittingly enough, will fund the new facility's technology learning center. It is to be named after Anthony Rich's late daughter, Janice Catherine Rich, who was a teacher in the Chicago area upon her untimely death at age 29.

"The learning center is a real dream come true," Morrical said.