With its field stone façade and adorned front entrance, the Jones Library stands tall in Amherst Center, nestled off of Amity Street and a stone’s throw from Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
And when its long-planned renovation work gets started, several parts of the building are expected to be demolished while others, including historic features, are preserved and even opened to the public.
With work potentially starting in a matter of months, library trustees have been giving the public a chance to get a better glimpse of the building dating back to 1928 via tours.
Since at least 2014, staff and trustees of the library have been making plans to rework the structure. Home to thousands of books, an assortment of community offerings and an expansive ESL program, the public library has outgrown its current space, according to The Jones Library Capital Campaign.
That, and many other issues, will be remedied with the $46.1 million Jones Library Building Project.
“I am hoping to let the building demonstrate to the people who come on the tour why this library needs to be both renovated and expanded,” Lee Edwards, a board of trustee member, told WAMC after leading a tour on Saturday, March 30.
With six visitors in tow that day, she highlighted everything from the employee-only spaces on the upper floors that would be available for the public post-renovation, what’s staying and what’s going, and even special items in storage upstairs, including a fake sarcophagus that could be heading to auction and raise further funds for the project.
“If you opened it up – it’s a portable bar,” she told the group after others guessed at what could possibly be inside.
According to Lee, the library is home to the third-largest Robert Frost collection “anywhere,” in addition to Emily Dickinson poems and letters, plus more.
Another issue to hopefully be remedied by the renovation – allowing the Special Collections department to have fully-functioning climate-controlled facilities for its preservation work.
“The fire department came and they said ‘You cannot have a door here - you cannot have any space that only has one mode of egress,’” Edwards told the group as it ventured into the Special Collections section, describing how previous efforts to outfit a space ran into fire code issues. “So, they took the door out, which means that climate control is compromised.”
Renovations are nothing too new for the library. Back in 1993, Jones saw major work like the addition of a central atrium, in addition to a large meeting room.
But even with the changes, given how the library was first constructed, pushing walls outward and opening up floor plans are a priority.
“They conceived of it as the center of this community, so they built it to look like a house - and the interior spaces are, as they say, domestic scale,” said Kent Faerber, another tour guide and co-chair of the capital campaign.
He tells WAMC that the library has outgrown its renovations over the past few decades, with the atrium posing its own structural problems - including leakage and the fact that it’s essentially a heat sink, given its glass ceiling.
Renovations would address the matter, in addition to accessibility issues and what the capital campaign calls “an obsolete heating and cooling system.”
With new spaces being opened up, he says the library will also be able to display some of the historic items it preserves, including Civil War tablets with the names of citizens from Amherst who served, including Black residents in the famous 54th regiment.
“Those tablets have been wandering around, looking for a place to live and we're going to provide a room for them that’s open all the time,” Faerber said.
The project is expecting general contractor bids to be in by mid-April.
Funding the project is the Town of Amherst, which has put up at least $15.8 million that was approved by both the town council and voters in 2021.
Another contributor: the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners with $13.8 million.
Other sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and Amherst College, have led to at least $39 million being raised in total as of February.
According to the campaign’s website, any shortfalls could be made up by temporarily borrowing from its endowment or other sources.
Regardless of costs, those on the tour, including Martha Ferrante of Florence, say they’re excited to see what the future holds for the library, especially knowing the efforts that’ll go into preserving much of the historic design inside and outside of the building.
“Well, I'm a carpenter’s daughter, so the woodwork was just phenomenal and amazing and I'm so glad it's going to be preserved,” Ferrante said.
The tour also focused on the role Jones plays in the greater Amherst community.
From offering programs like “Sing with Your Baby” to one-to-one tutoring in its ESL program, numerous groups are able to take advantage of the library.
Amherst educator Michael Silverstone told WAMC after the tour that the resources libraries can provide to a community can be indispensable.
“It's really important to have resources that are the commons, where, especially for people without means and children without means, to be able to access the resources to help them develop,” Silverstone said.
According to board trustee Edwards, with a bid in place and shovels hitting the ground soon, the main library could close in the summer before potentially opening back up in 2025.
Jones also has two other branches in Amherst – the North Amherst Library and the Munson Memorial Library in South Amherst.
Library tour dates and times can be found here.
UPDATE: Following the airing of this piece, Jones Library officials announced a temporary site had been selected to host the main library's services during construction.
According to its website, once the Jones Library building closes on Amity Street, a temporary library will later be opened at 101 University Drive, at what is known as the Slobody Building by the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus.
The announcement also mentioned a potential closure happening sometime around mid-May, and that library branch hours will expand during the transition.
