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Town Excited As Whiting Reading Center Prepares For Grand Opening
By Keith Hagarty
If you live on the far western side of Manchester, you no longer have to go to the books. The books will be coming to you.
For the thousands of residents in the Whiting section of Manchester, the library will soon be a little closer to home. That's because the grand opening of the Whiting Reading Center is just a few weeks away, set for Saturday, March 3 at 11 a.m.
"This is something we've been wanting to accomplish for years, to get an adjunct library in Whiting so that people in Whiting would have more ready-accessibility to the library's services," said Township Business Administrator Connie Lauffer. "It's wonderful. Absolutely wonderful."
Funded through a joint partnership between Manchester, Ocean County and the Ocean County Library System, the 4,500- square foot library will be the system's first new facility of the 21st century. The last project was the opening of the new Jackson Library five years ago.
Located in the newly constructed Whiting Commons shopping plaza, near the intersection of Route 530 and Route 70, Manchester Library Branch Manager Suzanne Scro believes the reading center will be a perfect fit for the amount of foot traffic anticipated at the new mall.
"There's a lot of people living out here in Whiting, and there's a lot of senior villages, and so a lot of them can't drive or maybe they can't get out at night and all the buses are going to be coming here to this new shopping center, so everyone's really excited," said Scro.
Working hands on at the site for the past month, Scro has been impressed by the progress of the new reading center.
"People have been asking for this for
years, for a real long time," said Scro. "Everything's going really smoothly. We
have our books on the shelves ready to go, we have our equipment installed and we're really excited."
With an estimated 30 percent of the Manchester Library's patrons coming from Whiting, Scro is looking forward to the opportunity to give them another outlet to meet their needs.
"We have a lot of Whiting residents who come out," she said. "We hear from a lot from them, saying, 'How come we don't have a branch out there?'"
Typically the answer to their request has been that the Ocean County Library System usually only designates one branch per municipality, and with Manchester already having a branch for several decades, it seemed a long shot to get another facility nearby.
However as more and more housing developments and retirement communities have sprouted up in the Manchester area over the last decade, particularly in Whiting, the need for a reading center became apparent.
"Since it's such a big township, it does make sense for us to have a location at the far end of the town, which is out here in Whiting," said Scro. "But that's why this (reading center) is not a full-service branch because in general you don't have two full-service branches in one township."
In her four years being at the Manchester branch since moving from Staten Island 20 years ago, Scro has seen the area grow by leaps and bounds.
"It's just grown tremendously since I moved down here from New York," she said. "And it's just growing more and more."
The Manchester branch's meeting room and larger size provide for a multitude of programs for children and adults; such a meeting room won't be available at the Whiting Reading Center.
"That's a big main difference," said Scro. "We also won't have a big reference collection here (at the Whiting Reading Center), although there will be a librarian here most of the time. In general, a reading center does not have a librarian, but we will be providing that service to the community."
Despite some minor differences, Scro emphasized the vast amount of similar services that will be offered to patrons at both facilities, including a wide selection of fiction and nonfiction books, compact discs and DVD's, and computer, Internet and Wi-Fiaccess.
When asked if residents are already trying to access the reading center prior to its grand opening just two weeks away, Scro just laughed.
"All day long," she said. "We had a mailing of these postcards (with a raffle entry for a $50 Stop n' Shop gift certificate) and they keep coming by with their postcards and waving them at us at the door because they want a chance to win the raffle, but it's really good because we have a lot of interest, and a lot of people peeking in to see what we have."
Mayor Michael Fressola and the township council have lent their full support to the new reading center, and much like the residents waving their postcards, are also eager to see the doors open.
"It's just a great, great opportunity for the use of that library in that area of town," said Board President Kenneth H. Vanderziel.
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