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Work on Steubenville library an ongoing project

STEUBENVILLE — Though there are no patrons in the building, no librarian can tell the construction noise to keep quiet.

The administrators of the Public Library of Steubenville and Jefferson County are working in the main building on South Fourth Street while a 10,000-square-foot addition is being built. The building, a Carnegie library that opened in 1902, closed to the public in October. It was the last of Ohio’s 816 public library buildings that did not comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act access requirements. With the new main entrance being built to face Slack Street, there will be a ground-level entrance and an elevator to access other levels in the building.

As welders worked and metal banging noises occasionally rang out, the administrators of the library who have continued to work out of the main building during construction discussed what life has been like in a closed library building.

Mostly, it’s been a life of adjustment, getting used to working together in big open spaces instead of individual offices.

“There were walls between us and walls on both sides,” said public relations Director Jen Cesta.

“Other than Jenny, who had an open office, all the rest of us had doors we could shut. Here, it’s completely open,” said Mike Gray, assistant library director.

“Jen would move the printer so I couldn’t see her,” said Alan Hall, library director.

Empty boxes were moved as makeshift walls, but as books would come in — the library still has a job to do despite the main closure — the boxes would be taken away and used for storage.

“The big thing is that with phone calls, we’re all in one room and when we’re on the phone, everybody is there,” said Cesta. “But the most convenient part is that if I have a question, I can just yell across the desk. I didn’t ask as many questions before as I do now. We’re always talking about history. It’s the convenience of it.”

Hall recalled that in his first library job in school in the late 1970s, he worked in the Freiberger Library at Case Western Reserve University.

“Nobody spoke to each other. It was an academic library and I was working in government documents. I remember I took my lunch the first day there and there were 30 people in the lunchroom, all sitting there totally silent. I hadn’t brought anything to read, thinking I’d have someone to talk to. I said, ‘It’s a nice day,’ and a lady said, ‘We don’t talk,'” he said. His staff kind of rolled their eyes as he said, “This has worked out well because I’m sitting here with a lovely group of people.”

Spend any time with the library staff and the image of a mostly happy group that is comfortable with one another is easy to see. The shortest time employee in the group is Gray, who has been at the library for 16 years. Doug Wood, who catalogs books, has been with the library 23 years. Jamie Romanyak has been at the library for 20 years, straight out of high school, starting as a paige. Her positions have included children’s librarian and now she works in audiovisual cataloging. Hall and Fiscal Officer Nikki Magary have worked at the library for 36 years, Magary starting 15 days after Hall. Both will be leaving their posts early in 2019.

Hall said it’s been good for him to be on site as the construction goes on so that he can watch the work.

“A lot of libraries hire a construction supervisor. I guess I’m doing that here at no extra cost to the library,” he said. Follow Hall through the concrete and steel of the new wing, and he can share the picture in his mind of what the final product will be. He explains where the administrative offices will be in what was the children’s library, currently just a big space with a beautiful mantle at one end and an empty stage at the other, and how the elevator connects the levels that aren’t quite a full story apart.

Hall said the work is the first major renovation of the building with new plumbing and electrical systems, though the 1902 Carnegie portion of the building will retain its radiator heating system. Hall said the building is built like a fortress, with two courses of stone below the basement and two more where the blocks turn in the opposite direction. The building sits on solid gravel.

“The bookshelves never moved. They never shook,” amid the demolition of the garage wing from the early 1960s, Cesta said.

Asked if the building is scary because of how quiet it is without patrons, the staff all had their own reactions.

“When we got new windows in here a couple of years ago, it’s amazing how quiet it got up here,” Gray said.

“The building makes funny sounds in the winter. It still has its original steam radiators and the pipes rub on the floors as they go up and down. I like to think it’s the first librarian watching over her library,” Hall said. Ellen Summers Wilson only got to enjoy the Carnegie building from 1902 to 1904 when she died of tuberculosis, Hall said.

Hall said working with the big portrait of early 20th century Steubenville industrialist Dohrman Sinclair on one wall and Revolutionary War military leader George Rogers Clark on the other staring down at him can be a little odd.

“You feel Clark is watching and Sinclair is peeking at you,” he said.

The library originally was supposed to have gas lighting, and the pipes that never were used are still in the walls, Hall said. Edison’s electric light bulb came into fashion at about the same time, and Hall said the 1902 wiring is in better shape than what was installed in the 1950s.

Hall emphasized the steel in the new wing was made in Ohio, the fabricators are from St. Clairsville and the erectors are from Barnesville. The main contractor is VendRick Construction Inc. of Brookfield, which, Wood pointed out, also built the Toronto Junior-Senior High School.

Hall has accumulated a shelf of artifacts uncovered during construction, including some bricks from the Saratt house that was on the site donated for the library in the late 1800s, and a sewer pipe with decorative elements.

Hall, who has read board minutes for the library system dating to the beginning, said a big issue for construction was finding the main sewer, which was buried 11 feet deep. The library had its own 10-inch sanitary sewer installed in 1901, running to the big main sewer tunnel at Third Street, Hall said, and a city camera inspection shows it’s still in fine shape 117 years later. The library sewer cost $550 to install in 1901.

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