Ocean City Library Celebrates One Year

The new Ocean City Library will celebrate its first anniversary with an open house on Thursday, March 19, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Worcester County library system.

The new library building, a modern interpretation of the "stick style" architecture popular in Ocean City during the early 1900s, is located on the Coastal Highway at 100th Street in North Ocean City, across from High-rise Row. The address is 10003 Coastal Highway. Inside you'll find a striking two-story atrium with exposed steel beams and lots of natural lighting.
The anniversary celebration will begin with a screening of Casablanca, the classic 1942 film starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. The movie will begin at 4 p.m. in the meeting room on the mezzanine level. A children's movie will be shown at the same time in the juvenile section of the library.

Following the movie, there will be music and a fruit and dessert buffet, starting a little after 6 p.m. on the ground floor of the library. The music will be provided by the soprano, Margaret Brown, accompanied on the piano by Ellsworth Wheatley.

Ocean City's modern library is no longer small-town. The $6.1 million building offers a large collection of books, videos, and an Ocean City history room. Desktop computers with access to the Web are available for the public to use at no charge. If you bring your laptop computer, you can connect to wireless Internet anywhere in the building, on the porch, and even in the parking lot.

Has the new library been open for a year, already? Yes, March 19th will be one year to the day. Don't go looking for the old small-town library at 14th Street that served Ocean City for many years. Even the 14th Street building is gone.

Other branches of the Worcester County Library are in Berlin, Snow Hill, Pocomoke, and Ocean Pines.