By this time next year, if all goes as planned, Oak Brook residents should be used to using the new 25,000-square-foot public library now under construction.
And checking out books at the old Butler School, the library’s current and only other home, will be just a fading memory.
“I know this may sound a little strange, but I’m looking forward to the day when the new library is something that people in Oak Brook take for granted,” said Barbara Benezra, president of the Friends of the Oak Brook Public Library and a former member of the village’s Library Commission.
Benezra moved to Oak Brook nearly 20 years after the library opened in 1964 in one room of the 1921-vintage Butler School, then being used for Village of Oak Brook offices.
“I guess you could say I felt very disheartened,” Benezra said, recalling her first visit to the library, which by then had expanded into more of the building. “It seemed very small. They didn’t have a lot of materials. I would have liked to see more of everything.”
Disheartening or not, she had her family sign up for library cards–and learned the strides that the library already had made.
The library, 1112 Oak Brook Rd., was started by the Oak Brook Library Association, a volunteer organization that assembled donated books and checked them out to residents. Later, the village took over the library. The Village Board, which has financial control, formed the Oak Brook Library Commission as an advisory body.
Gradually, new technology and personnel were introduced, but space continued to be a problem even after the library took over the entire school building.
As the years passed, a movement for a large, modern building was countered, in part, by those comfortable with using their reciprocal borrowing privileges to get books from other libraries.
Lifelong Oak Brook resident George Mueller, 64, used to ride his bicycle to the Hinsdale Public Library when he was a boy.
“There were a lot of pros and cons about the new building,” Mueller said. But one advantage he saw to a bigger library is that it would provide a unifying effect to a village split into many subdivisions and where children attended schools in a variety of buildings and districts.
“There were several attempts to build a new library,” Benezra said, “and when a referendum passed in 1996, it only won by 52 percent of the vote, and then there were several lawsuits to stop the construction. But finally, five years later, it is under construction.”
The one-story building will have five times the square footage as the school building.
“The building is primarily glass and was designed with the idea of bringing the outdoors in,” Benezra said. “The shape is curvilinear–from above it looks like flower petals. To expand the space you would extend one or two of the petals outward.
“I think when the library opens, the building alone is going to knock people’s socks off. It’s going to be exciting.”
