FOLEY – An old house on East Rose Avenue is being torn down as part of plans to build Foley’s new library and community center.
The Foley City Council approved the demolition of the house located near the Foley Senior Center north of City Hall. The city will move the Symbol Health Clinic to a new building to be placed on the site where the house now stands.
Crews were working this week to demolish the house.
The current clinic building is located on East Orange Avenue. The city plans to build the new library at that location. Library construction is scheduled to start later this year and be completed in 2025.
The house now on East Rose Avenue is too dilapidated to use. Mayor Ralph Hellmich said a person had proposed to remove the old building at one point, but did not follow up on the proposal.
The mayor said it is not practical to renovate the building.
“We evaluated very closely and it would have been a tremendous amount of money to rehab this building,” Hellmich said. “We also looked and it wasn’t historic or anything like that. So it needs to go this way.”
The clinic building will be about 1,960 square feet in size. City officials said they also plan to keep most of the trees now on the property.
The new library to be constructed on the current site of the Symbol clinic, next to the Foley Dog Park and south of the Post Office, will have almost 40,000 square feet of space and be about twice the size of the current facility next to City Hall.
The $20-million facility will be a community center, with meeting space, an auditorium, computer labs and study rooms as well as a cafe and bookstore.
Plans call for the library to be a two-story building. The ground floor will include a children’s area and a multipurpose room. The children’s area will be expanded and include computers and an activity room that can also be used for storytimes for young children.