County Opens Nexus Center in Bunnell, Giving West Side ‘True Jewel’ Library Albanese Imagined 19 Years Ago

Carl Laundrie was there at the beginning: in the 1980s, when County Commissioner Merhl Shoemaker started pushing for a new library in Palm Coast, when Palm Coast wasn’t much more than a subdivision. And he was there on Thursday, when the county officially opened its new South Side library, known as the Nexus Center, on Commerce Parkway in Bunnell.

“I was lucky enough to be in the room as a reporter, when Merhl Shoemaker, the first Palm Coast Commission member, turned to the other four members of the County Commission and said, ‘We got to build a library,’” Laundrie recalled.

Shoemaker, who died in 1996, had been the first resident of Palm Coast to serve on the Flagler County Commission, serving from 1980 to 1992. Laundrie was a reporter for the News-Journal at the time. He is now a board member and past president of the Friends of the Library. Shoemaker was also president of the Friends of the Library when the library was a storefront at Palm Harbor Shopping Center, now Island Walk.

Shoemaker died in 1996, after ITT had donated 19 acres for a library on Palm Coast Parkway. On October 19, 1998, Laundrie was there, reporting on the groundbreaking for a 30,000-square-foot, $2.1 million library, or just $4.6 million in today’s dollars.

So it was quite a circle for Laundrie to witness Thursday’s grand opening and gala of the $16 million, 23,000-square-foot Nexus Center, so called because it is also the new home of the county’s Health and Human Services Department.

When Laundrie became the county’s chief spokesperson and communications director, he was responsible for writing the release announcing the hiring of Holly Albanese as the new library director, who’d taken over for the retiring Doug Cisney. That was in June 2006. Albanese’s very first thought? “One of her primary goals will be to move the tiny Bunnell branch of the county library from its storefront location on State Road 100 to its own building, she said,” according to a News-Journal report at the time.

It took only 19 years, with an interregnum of several years when Bunnell had its own library downtown, where the post office used to be, before the county kicked it to the curb again. 

“She’s the one who achieved it. She’s the firecracker behind it all,” Laundrie said (he had also worked with Albanese on the county’s centennial celebration in 2017).

“It feels like home,” Albanese said. She’s moved her office there from the Palm Coast branch. “I’m at the library. I love the library. No matter which one it is, it feels like home.”

The hundred-page punch list the workers were going through a few weeks ago is all but completed. Some 30,000 to 40,000 volumes have filled the shelves, with more “collection development” ahead, now that the Bunnell branch is no longer constrained by the matchbox-sized facility it occupied at Marvin’s Garden until Nov. 30. The $1,800 a month paid for that facility has ceased.

“I think what we’ve created here is a true jewel, and I think a great community resource,” Albanese said. “So I hope everybody loves it. I’m just proud of what we’ve accomplished here.”

An impressive throng of people turned up for the ribbon-cutting and gala Thursday evening as Albanese and County Chair Leann Pennington led the celebration, first on the building’s front porch, then inside as people toured, gaped and, in the case of 8-year-old Madeleyn O’Brien, got right to reading in the children’s room. No surprise: Madeleyn happens to be the granddaughter of Wendi and Donald O’Brien, the former county commissioner and current chair of the Library Board of Trustees, and an omnivorous reader.

Every official interviewed at the opening remarked on the distinctiveness of the building’s architecture and its elegant color and thematic schemes—classically modern on the outside (picture a miniature version of Philip Johnson’s famous AT&T Building in New York), wavy and leisurely on the inside. “I can’t get over the color scheme and the art, the way it looks in there,” Commissioner Greg Hansen said. “It feels like a library should be.” He said the new library “helps ease the pain of leaving this job.” Hansen is not running again as his term ends in less than a year.

Commissioner Dave Sullivan described the library’s interior as “a friendly feeling,” and Commissioner Kim Carney liked the ample parking and room for expansion. (See: “A Tour of New Nexus Center Is a ‘Coast to Country’ Surfing Experience in Flagler’s Ultra-Modern Library.”)

“For much that we went through to get to this point,” Pennington said as she was preparing to address the large crowd, “I think that the people of the west side are really going to appreciate having services, because it’s just an underserved community in general. So I’m hoping that the people of Bunnell take advantage of this opportunity.”

“It’s an outstanding building. I think it gives Sheriff Staly’s Sheriff’s Center a run for its money,” she said with a laugh: The Sheriff’s Operations Center was just across the street, and it was Pennington who, unaware of the sloshing it would entail, carried the water on Sheriff’s Chief of Staff Mark Strobridge’s behalf to rename the Operations Center after Staly.

The 50,000-square-foot building across the street actually sits on land that was initially slated for the library, as Jim Ulsamer, the just-retired and long-time chair of the library board said, just as Pennington began the dedication. Then came the push to put the Operations Center there instead.

“That was the time when I got up at a meeting and said ‘over my dead body,’” the characteristically candid Ulsamer said. “He got it anyway.” But being at the opening of the new library was a capstone for Ulsamer, and “the only thank you I want.”