Over at 61 Crown Street in the Stockade District, the new headquarters for the Kingston Public Library, the view from the window of director Margie Menard’s temporary office is impressive.
Hands outstretched, torso girdled with strange egg-shaped pouches, a two-story-tall painted mural of Artemis. Greek goddess of the hunt rising from a quarry, looks back from a brick building across the street.
“We’ve been here just about a month,” said Menard. “We’ll be here from a year to a year and a half.”
This stately brick piece of architecture, known as the Cioni Building, was most recently occupied by the Kingston School District administrative offices.
It started its life as a kindergarten-through-grade-six elementary school. “It was the old Number Seven,” said Menard, “and I know that because the first week we were open I met a woman who had gone to school here from kindergarten through sixth grade. She had moved away but was home visiting, and was excited that we were opening the same week that she was in town so she could come back and revisit her old school.”
In 2017, the school district sold the building to property developer Neil Bender, who had advertised his plans to turn it into a hotel and spa.
Those plans having not yet materialized, the Cioni Building seemed like a good temporary fit for the library’s 50,000 books and 15,000 items of all other circulating media to occupy while the permanent home of the library, a Midtown brick building on Franklin Street, was being renovated.
Plans at 55 Franklin involve moving both an elevator and a stairwell into an exterior addition on the Liberty Street side of the 144-year-old structure, once the old Number Eight school.
“The elevator that we have is so tiny,” said Menard. “You can’t really even turn a wheelchair around in it, never mind a gurney or a stroller or you know, anything else that you might want to get to the second floor.”
The exterior addition at 55 Franklin will enclose a new ADA-compliant elevator and a fire-safe stairwell, which Minard said will allow the library to take the back stairwell out of the building as well. “So we’ll have the front stairwell and the new stairwell, and we’ll be able to open up a lot of real estate on the first floor,” she explained.
The Cioni Building has no elevator at all. Its second floor is so vast and empty that it could serve well for ballroom-dancing instruction. It has instead been left unshelved and unbooked.
All the library’s books have been able to fit on the first floor. Even the local history room has been re-created. A locked door guards the delicate and valuable old tomes one can peruse with permission.
In September 2022, Kingston residents authorized a $14-million bond to underwrite the renovation. Two weeks ago the library board of trustees approved contractor Mid Hudson Construction Management to undertake the renovation and upgrade of the library’s permanent home.
“One of the nice things about being a library district is that our trustees and our budget is publicly voted on annually,” said Menard. “So the members of the community vote for their representatives on the library board, and they vote to essentially tax themselves to support the library.”
All regular library services continue at the temporary location of the Kingston Library uptown. The building has ample front and back parking in a section of the block at that time of year when in the afternoon the trees fill with disputative crows.
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