Bayside's New Library Opens at OneNorth; Fall Fest Returns to Ellsworth Park
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Walk into the North Shore Library on a Saturday morning this September and you will find sunlight. That sentence would have been meaningless a year ago, because the library did not have windows worth mentioning. North Shore Family Adventures reports that, for nearly forty years, the four towns that fund it, Bayside, Fox Point, Glendale, and River Hills, shared a building on North Port Washington Road that was mostly underground, built in 1986, with no real green space and a floor plan that had nothing to do with how people actually use a library now. That building sat in Glendale, serving all four towns from there.
This year that changed, and the change is worth more attention than it has gotten. The library reopened on February 2, 2026, on the ground floor of The Symphony, the first completed building in Bayside's OneNorth development at the corner of North Port Washington and West Brown Deer roads. Its new address, 711 Grace Street, puts it inside Bayside for the first time in the institution's history. A grand opening ceremony followed on March 14. Seven months later, the library is open, while the rest of the development around it remains in progress.
The old library was roughly 16,000 square feet, mostly below grade. The new one is about 24,000 square feet, nearly 50% more room, with a story time space for children's programming, nine study rooms, a stage area, a young adult section, a sensory room, and a community gathering space that the old building simply had no floor plan for. In a CBS 58 report, Library Director Rhonda Gould described the goal plainly:
"Let us know what you'd like to see. We want to bring programming that serves everyone."
Getting there was not simple, and the paper trail behind the project tells you something about how these regional institutions actually get built in the North Shore. Cobalt Partners, the developer behind OneNorth, donated the building shell, valued at $4 million. The La Macchia family gave $1 million specifically for the children's section. Congresswoman Gwen Moore secured a $500,000 federal earmark. Cardinal Stritch, which had sold the land for the old 1986 building decades earlier, contributed roughly $500,000 in equipment and furniture this time around. A capital campaign called "Building a Better North Shore Together," co-chaired by former MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and philanthropist Marianne Lubar, pulled in additional donations from the community. Even with all of that, a roughly $2.4 million funding gap remained, and the four municipalities had to approve cost-sharing agreements in May 2025 to close it. A separate dispute with the North Shore Library Foundation, which reportedly held about $800,000 in donations it had not released, was reported during the final stretch before opening.
None of that shows up when you're checking out a book on a Tuesday afternoon. But the funding gap and the municipalities' cost-sharing agreements show how much coordination it took to make the library possible. It had to be assembled out of a developer's shell donation, a family gift, a federal earmark, a legacy university's leftover furniture, and four village boards agreeing to split a bill nobody had fully budgeted for.
Here is the current mix of completed and planned pieces at OneNorth. The Symphony, the building that houses the library, was completed back in 2024 with 98 apartment units and street-level retail. That part is occupied. A few blocks over, Artalia Bayside, a $40 million senior living community with 153 units operated by Koru Health, broke ground in September 2025 and is still under construction.
The next phase, known as Building E, is planned to add commercial space and apartments to OneNorth. When Cobalt Partners first floated the concept in November 2025, Building E was pitched as a five-story structure with a 50,000-square-foot full-service grocer, a 60,000-square-foot health club, and up to 180 luxury apartments. By June 2026, the plan had shrunk. The grocery space is now closer to 30,000 square feet, the apartment count has dropped to somewhere between 119 and 142 units depending on how a fifth floor gets classified, and Cobalt's CEO confirmed that no grocer or fitness tenant had signed on yet. The fitness center concept survived the redesign largely intact, while the planned grocery store was reduced in size.
What that means in practice, for anyone who lives near the plaza right now: the library is open, the apartments above and around it are occupied, and the boutique shops and restaurants featured on OneNorth's site have not all opened yet. The green plaza exists as a physical space you can walk across today. The commercial spaces remain part of the development's ongoing build-out.
This is the detail that puts the whole picture in focus. Bayside's single biggest community day of the year, the Village's annual Fall Fest, returns on Saturday, September 26, 2026, and it is not happening at OneNorth. It is happening where it has always happened, at Ellsworth Park, 9075 North Regent Road.
The lineup this year includes:
Ellsworth Park has hosted Fall Fest for years, and it remains the venue for the 2026 event. The plaza at OneNorth has also been standing since The Symphony opened in 2024, while the commercial phase remains in progress.
If you live near the plaza, the practical upshot is straightforward. The library is genuinely worth building a weekend around now, not as a placeholder but as a real destination, with story time, a sensory room, and study space that the old Glendale building never had. The plaza around it is walkable and pleasant, but treat it as a work in progress rather than a finished shopping and dining strip. And when Fall Fest rolls around on the 26th, expect the same Ellsworth Park rhythm the village has run for years, not a new plaza-based version of it, at least not yet.
Bayside is in a period of ongoing development. The library has opened, while the commercial portion of OneNorth remains in development; Building E plans were reduced during redesign and are still working through village review. Watching which piece catches up to the other, the grocery and fitness tenants at Building E, or the retail storefronts around the plaza, is a genuinely interesting thing to track if you live here, whether or not you ever plan on moving.
For homeowners thinking about what any of this means for the value of a house near OneNorth, or for buyers watching how a development like this actually gets built out phase by phase, that is exactly the kind of neighborhood-level pattern worth a closer conversation. Kelton Hatton tracks these shifts along the North Shore as they happen, not after the fact. If you want to talk through what a project like OneNorth means for your street specifically, reach out and request a free home valuation.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Get assistance in determining current property value, crafting a competitive offer, writing and negotiating a contract, and much more. Contact Kelton today to discuss all your real estate needs!