Cranberry Public Library all dressed up for 50th anniversary
CRANBERRY TWP — Cranberry Public Library recognized its 50th anniversary Tuesday with a “low-key” costumed celebration.
Dressed as the precocious piglet Olivia, director Leslie Pallotta said everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Wonder Woman attended the “Cranberry Library Has Character” birthday party.
“Our birthday’s on Halloween — it’s kind of a fun, odd, quirky day to have a birthday,” she said. “So we went the theme of characters, and I asked the staff to dress as their favorite book character.”
Tuesday’s festivities included ice cream cake and miniature Bundt cakes — “bundtinis” — available to the public to help celebrate.
“Dairy Queen and Nothing Bundt Cakes are so generous, and they’re always so gracious to us,” Pallotta said. “They donated those to help us celebrate, so that’s super sweet. No pun intended.”
Pallotta said the staff also assembled displays to commemorate its founding in 1973.
“We’ve been playing 1973 songs all day, we have a display of the bestsellers from ’73, and the movies from 1973,” she said. “There’s a big poster on the wall that sort of does a comparison, you know, of what a gallon of gas cost then versus now.”
The library’s Halloween birthday made “party planning really easy,” according to Pallotta, with its 40th anniversary in 2013 featuring ’70s-themed costumes.
“I can’t imagine that they sat around back in 1973 and said, ‘Hey, let’s sign those legal documents on the 31st,” she said with a laugh. “I think it was just a happy accident.”
Reflecting on its 50 years of service in the community, Pallotta said the “biggest change” in the library has been the increasing introduction of technology and services.
“You wouldn’t have seen a makerspace in a library 50 years ago,” she said, “and we’re lucky and fortunate to have a great big makerspace.”
And since its “grassroots” founding in 1973, Pallotta said the library itself has grown over 150-times its original size.
“Back then, 50 years ago, we were in a 9-foot-by-12-foot closet up in the old municipal center on Rochester Road,” she said. “And now we’re 17,000 square feet.”
Ever since its last major anniversary in 2013, the library’s home in the municipal center has seen and continues to see renovations and updates to its offerings.
“If you ask me to guess what we’ll see in the next 10 years, I would bet that DVDs and physical audios will be gone,” she said. “Streaming seems to be next. I mean, it’s here.”
Pallotta said libraries at the county and district levels are already in the process of acquiring streaming services for their members.
“In a way, I’m kind of looking forward to that simply because of the space that it will free up for everything else,” she said, laughing.
But what ultimately sets the Cranberry Public Library apart — and has made it an increasingly “regional” library — is its atmosphere, according to Pallotta.
“The analogy I use all the time is: The library is like the community’s living room,” she said. “It is the place where people can kind of come to hang out. There’s no stress — we welcome everybody.”
She added that the library also boasts “the friendliest, most outgoing, enthusiastic” staff and remains a fixture in the community after 50 years.
“We’re still here,” she said. “And I suspect we will be for a long time.”
