The Springfield-Greene County Library District’s largest facility is set to expand, with even more space for additional events and programming.
Community leaders gathered Tuesday morning to celebrate the groundbreaking of a new auditorium at the Library Center . Spanning 9,340 square feet, the new auditorium will include 500 seats. Similar to bleachers, they will be able to retract within 45 minutes but will have a seat back. Jessie East, branch manager of the Library Center, said the expansion will also include a catering kitchen, green room for visiting guests and a reception lobby with exhibit space. The auditorium will also be able to be transformed to hold banquets seating up to 120 people.
The current auditorium includes only 150 seats, which has meant the library had to move bookshelves out of the way to hold larger events or had to host events off site.
“We’ve known for about 10 years that … if there was one thing we were going to get to do, we wanted to be able to do a larger auditorium,” East said.