The doors of the new Foley Community Library officially opened Tuesday, Aug. 4, welcoming hundreds of residents eager to explore the city’s new $20 million community resource.
The 40,000-square-foot library and community center marks the completion of more than three years of planning and construction. The building replaces a library that opened when Foley was a fraction of its present size, and it lands in a city that has spent two decades converting rapid growth into civic infrastructure.
During a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Mayor Ralph Hellmich said the project was completed under budget and described the facility as much more than a traditional library.
“We have doubled the size of this library. It is now 40,000 square feet,” Hellmich said.
The figure understates the leap. The old building’s footprints, meeting rooms and stacks had been outgrown a generation ago by a city that did not exist when they were drawn; the new facility doubles the square footage while tripling the range of what happens inside it.
A building built around change
Hellmich said the new building reflects how the role of public libraries has evolved.
“Libraries in this country are changing,” he said. “This library is a community center as well as what we think of as a traditional library. The programs here will support our community, whether it’s reading programs, children’s programs, adult programs, genealogy, on and on and on.”
He added that the facility includes extra spaces the community can use for its own events, and noted the demand the system already sees: “We have the busiest library in Baldwin County. It is active and it is important to our community.”
The busiest-library claim in Alabama’s fastest-growing county is the central fact behind the project. A library branch that leads its county in circulation and visits, while operating out of a building sized for a town of 4,500, generates exactly the kind of crowding the new facility was designed to end.
From 4,500 residents to 30,000
When Foley’s previous library opened in 1984, the city had about 4,500 residents; today, Foley’s population has grown to about 30,000. The growth that transformed a small railroad town into one of Baldwin County’s commercial centers — drawn by the beaches, the outlet shopping, the interstate connection and the farm-and-heritage identity the city deliberately cultivated downtown — simply passed the old building by.
Library Director Kate Norris said the expansion had become a necessity.
“We needed the space,” Norris said. “Before we moved, we were on top of each other. The last story time we had in the old facility, we had over 100 people.”
More than 100 children and caregivers in a story time is a success the old building could not hold. The crowd that packed those sessions reflected the city’s young families — the same demographic wave that has filled Foley’s schools — arriving at a facility designed for a population a fraction of its size.
Norris said the additional square footage will also let the library serve as more of a gathering place.
“We are a place of connection, and we are going to be able to offer more opportunities for people to come in and connect and just be a part of the community,” she said. “We already offered a lot of programming. We now have the opportunity to offer so much more.”
What’s inside the new building
The new library features a sensory room, dedicated children’s and teen activity areas, the Children’s Story Grove, a STEAM-STEM lab, genealogy resources, and a multipurpose meeting room that seats 277 people, plus a second-floor porch overlooking the Perry Wilbourne Antique Rose Trail and the city’s Dog Park.
Each of those spaces answers a specific kind of demand. The sensory room serves children with sensory-processing needs and their families — an amenity few libraries of any size in the region offer. The STEAM-STEM lab extends the maker-space movement into the school-year routines of students who will use it for coding, robotics and science projects. The genealogy section speaks to South Baldwin’s deep roots, where family histories in the county’s church and courthouse records reach back generations. The 277-seat meeting room gives the city what it has lacked: a public hall large enough for community meetings, performances and civic events.
Even the porch is deliberate. Overlooking the Antique Rose Trail — the walking path built along the old railroad corridor and named for the heirloom roses planted along it — and the city’s Dog Park, the second floor extends the library into the network of public spaces that connects downtown Foley, making the building a stop on a larger circuit rather than a destination apart from it.
Who built it
During the ceremony, city leaders thanked library staff — including the library’s 25 employees — along with other municipal departments, White-Spunner Construction, Williams Blackstock Architects and the Foley City Council for their roles in bringing the project to life.
White-Spunner Construction also donated a collection of children’s books to help fill the new shelves. The Mobile-based builder has been part of the region’s construction boom for decades, and the gesture — books for a building it just delivered — set the tone of a project that city officials repeatedly described as a community effort rather than a municipal transaction.
Opening day included a scavenger hunt raffle and a bookmark contest, with winners to be announced later in the week. The activities turned the ribbon-cutting into a children’s event as much as a civic one, and hundreds of residents took the first-day tour that doubled as the building’s shakedown.
What the neighbors said
Foley resident Eric Williams called the new library “a wonderful thing,” saying the city “reimagined this whole library” and “expanded on it.”
Maritza Weeks, a mother who attended the opening, praised the upgrade, noting the previous location “was so little and it got so packed all the time.”
The two reactions captured the range of what the opening meant: for longtime residents, a civic statement about what Foley has become; for young families, the end of a daily struggle with crowded rooms and waiting lists for programs that never had enough floor space.
Hours, location and the old building’s future
The Foley Community Library, located at 230 E. Orange Ave., is open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. It is closed Sundays.
The weekday-evening hours matter to working parents: a library open until 7 p.m. can absorb the after-school crowd that the old building struggled to fit, and the Friday-and-Saturday schedule keeps the facility available to the beach-bound and weekend visitors who stream through Foley’s downtown.
The former library building on East Laurel Avenue will be renovated for future municipal use.
The former library building adjacent to City Hall will undergo renovations that will allow city departments currently operating offsite to consolidate onto a single municipal campus.
That plan gives the city a second benefit from the project. Departments now scattered in leased or improvised space around town can gather next to City Hall, which centralizes services for residents and ends the rent and maintenance costs of the scattered sites. The old library, purpose-built as a public building and sitting at the center of the city’s civic block, becomes the vehicle for that consolidation rather than a vacancy to be filled.
A library for a city that grew up around it
The $20 million project was the largest single civic investment in Foley’s recent history, and it arrives as the city continues to invest in its downtown — the rose trail, the park system, the heritage museum and the events calendar that fills the streets on weekends. A library designed as a community center fits that pattern: the city has been building the places where its new population can become a community, and the new building at 230 E. Orange Ave. is now the largest of them.
For the library’s 25 employees, the opening ends years of making do — programs in hallways, meetings in storage rooms, story times that overflowed. For the city, it closes a gap that opened the day the 1984 library was built for a Foley that no longer exists: between what the busiest library in Baldwin County does every day, and the size of the building it had to do it in.
The first week’s traffic suggested the crowding problem has moved with the collection. Residents who toured the new stacks on opening day found the scavenger hunt clues, entered the raffle and sized up the meeting room — and the city announced the contest winners later in the week to a building that, for the first time in a generation, had room for everyone who came.