Library move begins Saturday
09/02/2005 by Bradley Parsons Staff Writer One of downtown’s most distinctive buildings will close its doors to the public Saturday when the Haydon Burns Library shuts down to make way for the moving vans. Haydon Burns will shut its doors at 6 p.m. The new Main Branch Library will open Nov. 12 at its location across from Hemming Plaza on the corner of Monroe and Laura streets. Until the City unveils the crown jewel of its expanding library system, downtown will temporarily be without a library. In the interim, the closest branches to downtown are the San Marco Branch on Hendricks Avenue and Riverside’s Willow Branch on Park Avenue. The City has already planned a week-long celebration to accompany the Main Branch opening. But the festivities can’t begin until the City moves furniture, office equipment and hundreds of thousands of books from the old Ocean Street location. Before the doors open to the new $95 million main branch, Library Director Barbara Gubbin must oversee a process to fill 300,000 square feet of space, including a cafe, bookstore and a 400-seat auditorium.The City will move the entire 412,000-piece collection from the old building, comprising DVDs, videos, maps and virtually every form of media. But the heaviest burden, literally, will be moving the books. Several hundred thousand of them have to be catalogued, placed onto palettes and into a moving van. It’s all the complications of a normal move, with the Dewey Decimal System thrown in for good measure. The move will take three weeks, cover three City blocks and cost $75,000. The move will be paid for out of the Main Branch’s construction budget, which was part of the Better Jacksonville Plan. One of the issues yet to be resolved is parking for Main Branch employees. Gubbin was initially told her employees would be charged a reduced rate to park in the garage adjacent to the main branch. Non-city employees will be charged $80 per month to use the garage. But, City Chief of Staff Dan Kleman told Gubbin in an e-mail that those discounts could be nixed by the City Council’s proposal to eliminate parking discounts for City employees.
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