photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Kathleen Morgan, director of the Lawrence Public Library Friends & Foundation, stands on the library lawn on Wednesday, March 18, 2026, where the library is planning a new pavilion and event space.

There are successful parties at the Lawrence Public Library, like the one that raised more than $400,000 for an outdoor performance space and various other projects earlier this month.

And then there’s “Deflategate.”

That what Kathleen Morgan, director of the Lawrence Public Library’s Friends & Foundation, calls one specific movie night gone wrong. It was an outdoor showing of “Jurassic Park” on a big inflatable screen, and the library was trying to power it without using a generator from the city’s parks department.

“Every time there was some bass, music — it’s a booming movie — the electricity would cut and the screen just melted,” Morgan said. “It happened like seven times.”

With this year’s “record-setting” After Hours fundraising bash in the books, Morgan thinks Deflategates will be a thing of the past. She’s confident the library will be able to afford the pavilion and performance space on its lawn, with enough power to hold all sorts of outdoor community events without mishaps.

“(We’ll) know that we have enough electricity to handle people’s amps, and we’ll have a movie screen that can get attached to it so we can do outdoor movies and things like that,” she said. “We’re really, really excited.”

photo by: Contributed

A rendering of a pavilion planned for the Lawrence Public Library lawn.

After Hours, a party at the library with food from local restaurants and craft cocktails, is the library’s largest annual fundraising event. Each year it raises money for a big project and a variety of smaller programs like the library’s summer reading program, Booktoberfest and Read Across Lawrence. Last year, the funding need was expanding the library’s digital services, and the event raised around $130,000.

This year, Morgan said, “we got really ambitious.”

“It was crazy,” she said. “Record-breaking, because we chose a much bigger project for our funding need than in the past.”

Just two days before the March 6 party, Morgan said, the library got its official cost estimates for the pavilion from the construction company, and they were more than $100,000 greater than what the library had expected. “I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh!'” she said. But the library and its fundraising arm thought, “we’ll just see how far we get.”

By the time the party was over, there was only a $90,000 gap, and some donors have stepped up since then and offered to help the library close it, Morgan said.

“So, we’re inching toward the goal, and I’m very confident that we’ll get there,” she said.

With the pavilion, the library won’t have to do nearly as much work to use the lawn space for events. Usually, it has to set up a stage each time and borrow a power cart from the city’s Parks, Recreation and Culture department to prevent any Jurassic-sized meltdowns.

“It’s a lot of work to reset a stage every time,” Morgan said. “This way it will be there, the proper amount of electricity will be there.”

And the benefits won’t just be for the library, but for all sorts of local organizations. The library doesn’t own the lawn, but leases it from the city’s Parks, Recreation and Culture department, she said, so it’s not going to be exclusively for library events. She anticipates the Lawrence Arts Center and local musicians could use it, too.

It’s not yet clear when the pavilion project will begin, because it still has to go through the city approval processes, but Morgan said “hopefully that will be efficient and quick and we can get underway.” And she’s impressed by the community’s support to help make the project happen.

“I am constantly amazed and just incredibly overwhelmed by the generosity of people in this town,” she said. On the night of After Hours, “I was going into it thinking, ‘Oh, how are we going to do this?’

“And all these wonderful people stepped up,” she said, “because they wanted to help the library.”