In 1995, the North Boulder Subcommunity Plan mentioned a possible library in North Boulder. This idea resurfaced in the 2007 Library Master Plan and became a main goal in the 2018 plan. Nearly 30 years later, the North Boulder Public Library is set to open, joining four other branches under the new Boulder Public Library District.
Located at 4500 13th Street, the 11,000-square-foot NoBo Library will be fully staffed with 11 employees. The library, which broke ground in April 2023, is described as a “third space,” a place for people to foster community outside of work or home. It replaces the NoBo Corner Library, which opened in 2014. Despite being beloved, the Corner Library, with only 570 square feet, struggled to meet community needs beyond being a place to pick up and drop off books. The Corner Library closed last month and its staff will move to the NoBo Library.
“There just aren’t many spaces in North Boulder that are free and open to the public,” Celine Cooper, the NoBo Library’s manager, told Boulder Reporting Lab. “With this library, having full service hours, we are providing that space for community members to browse and to connect and to learn and to do whatever they want to do.”
The NoBo Library grand opening party is on Saturday, June 29, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The free event will feature food, activities and the unveiling of a musical walkway that lines the exterior path to the second floor. Laura Hankins, director of collector services for the Boulder Public Library District, described it as an art exhibit that makes sounds when stepped on, like a piano. Titled “Nuages,” the exhibit was funded by a city program. Daily Tous les Jours, the Montreal-based team behind the piece, will attend the opening celebration.
In total, the library cost approximately $16 million to design and build, with nearly a third funded by revenue from a city culture tax.
Cooper hopes to have a soft opening for the library before the end of June, depending on the completion of tasks like inspections, occupancy certificates and moving staff into the building.
Once open, amenities will include meeting rooms, study rooms, a makerspace and a computer area. BoulderReads, Boulder’s adult literacy and English learning program, will move from the main library to NoBo. About 10% of the collection will be in Spanish, ranging from picture books to adult novels, to better serve the North Boulder community, Cooper said.
Another key feature of the library is a yellow slide built into the outside wall next to the south exit, accessed by climbing a strong mesh net. The architecture firm, New York-based WorkAC, designed the library to have a whimsical feel, Cooper said.
WorkAC’s report states the NoBo Library site is not in the floodplain and doesn’t require special flood protection. However, Cooper said the site has a large water catchment system to reduce flooding risk.
The library is accessible by two bus routes: SKIP on Broadway and 204 through 19th Street. It can also be reached via the Four Mile Creek Pathway and Broadway’s sidewalks. A new path will connect the Meadows mobile home community to the library, avoiding a tedious loop around Yarmouth or Violet.
The NoBo Library’s 11 staff members are made possible by the Boulder Public Library District. In 2022, voters approved a property tax-funded library district across much of Boulder County. This change means a seven-member Library District Board of Trustees now manages the city’s libraries, rather than the City of Boulder.
The library district’s projected operating expenditures for 2024 are about $20 million. In 2022, the bulk of the funding for the city’s library’s comes from city sales tax revenue, totaling about $10 million, according to city staff.
Cooper said the district has hired 30 to 40 people this year and aims to reach at least 50 new hires, a 50% increase in staff compared to before the transition.
“We are trying to get back to pre-Covid staffing levels,” Cooper said. The goal is to have the Boulder Main Library, the NoBo Library and the Carnegie, Reynolds and Meadows libraries fully staffed. “It’s more staff, more funding, more opportunities to connect with the community,” she added.
Regarding NoBo, Cooper said, “We were planning on operating at pretty low staffing levels, and now we’re at the maximum level that we want to be at and we’re super excited.”
Future plans for the library include an accessible playground, set to be unveiled in the fall pending board approval and equipment delivery. “Anyone, whether you have a wheelchair or walker or cane or none of the above, can still access a lot of the play features and have fun,” Cooper said.
Other plans include expanding programs to connect homeless people and others from vulnerable communities to resources and linking the library to the upcoming Violet Park.
Elsewhere in the Boulder Public Library District, a new library is planned for Gunbarrel in 2025, and the Carnegie Library for Local History hopes to resume normal hours instead of being appointment-only.
Hopefully, some thought was given as to how to prevent misuse of the new library, including illegal drug use in the restrooms.
As a resident in a building directly adjacent to this new library, and being familiar with the undesirable congregation of transients at the main library along with the mess/trash/drugs it brings, I fully expect that this library’s proximity to the homeless shelter will invite an undesirable element to our neighborhood. The Broadway underpass at Rosewood, next to the new library, is already unusable due to the informal housing it provides, and completely unsafe for my wife and children. The small parking lot at the library will most likely cause spillover into the neighborhood lots, where the city already waived parking requirements. The confluence of all of this is likely to tank property value, and devolve a neighborhood already struggling to manage drugs (people openly do drugs outside of Amante’s) and parking (no overnight parking on Broadway) into urban decay.
Hi Ryan – North Boulder Alliance is your neighborhood advocacy group made up of residents and businesses, and we are calling for city leaders to act now and help us make North Boulder a safe and thriving community. Like you, we are concerned about the dramatically rising crime in NoBo, the new library being unsafe and unwelcoming for families, as well as the centralization of more homeless services in North Boulder. Please sign our petition (www.change.org/SafetyIssuesandRisingCrimeinNorthBoulder) and consider joining us to address the issues we are facing in North Boulder. Our email is northboulderalliance80304@gmail.com. Thank you for your comment!