New library will go into former south Wichita tire store, City Council decides
Wichita’s Linwood Branch Library will be moving into a larger space that was formerly a tire store at the Wichita Mall, the City Council decided Tuesday.
The move will nearly double the size of the library, from 3,752 square feet to 6,904, said Library Director Cynthia Berner.
It will also more than double the number of public computers from seven to 16, Berner said.
The new location approved by the council, at 4195 E. Harry, is in an outbuilding space that was occupied for decades by Karl’s Tire. Both the tire store and an attached Westlake Ace Hardware store moved out of the mall in 2018.
The Wichita Mall was once a staple of the city’s retail scene with a large Montgomery Ward department store, a Burlington Coat Factory, an Osco, numerous shops and a multi-screen theater. But it went on a steep decline after malls and theaters in the rapidly growing suburbs cut into its business and Ward’s went bankrupt and closed nationwide.
Now, a Big Lots store is the only significant shopping presence there and the former mall is occupied mainly by government offices and a satellite campus of Wichita State University.
While it’s not much of a mall, Berner said it’s a super site for a library.
“It’s a storefront facility where we would have great visibility from Harry, which is a wonderful benefit for customers who have a great deal of difficulty finding their current location,” she said. The current branch library is in Linwood Park near Hydraulic and Mt. Vernon in south Wichita.
The new location also has direct access to two Wichita Transit lines.
Because the current Linwood branch is in a city recreation center, it can only be open when the center is open, “which means that for nearly two decades there have been no weekend hours,” Berner said.
There’s no current plan to expand the hours at the new library because of budget concerns brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it will have flexibility to offer more open hours in the future, she said.
Also, the new library will have a layout based on a scaled-down version of the downtown Advanced Learning Library, with meeting rooms that can be accessed for community events when the rest of the library is closed, she said.
There will be additional costs involved because the library is moving from a city-owned facility to leased space.
The city will pay $49,000 a year in rent, and about $100,000 a year overall, including insurance, utilities and custodial services, she said.
The $49,000 is only slightly more than the tire store paid for the site two years ago, said Joe Dobrava, owner and general manager of Karl’s Tires.
“It’s good to see they’ve got a plan for it,” he said.
This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 4:45 PM.
