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Hope Is an Open Book
By Walter Dead Myers
IT'S difficult to explain exactly what being poor is all about, or why access to books and ideas might be as important as a free breakfast. But helping others to understand that became important as I thought about the 115th Street branch of the New York Public Library, in Harlem.
The branch, between Frederick Douglass Boulevard and St. Nicholas Avenue, has been closed for renovations since July 2002. The work was meant to be completed in January 2004. Now it's expected to be finished in the spring (exactly when isn't clear).
No doubt the library officials are doing the right thing by renovating and refurbishing the old building, which opened in 1908. And a temporary branch has been set up a few blocks away, although it's a small fraction of the size of the original -- just one room in all.
But what's missing is a sense of urgency -- a recognition that lives are at stake.
As a child growing up in Harlem, I measured my life, and my potential, by what I saw around me. I saw first that I was black and poor. My father was a janitor, and my mother, never very healthy, cleaned apartments when she was well enough to work.
There was no single event that traumatized me, no devastating storm in my life, but slowly the life of the poor began to grind me down. A murdered uncle, an alcoholic parent, the realization that there was no way that I could afford college brought despair to my life. The promising 14-year-old I had been became the 15-year-old chronic truant who had to report to a city agency once a week for supervision.
But amid the chaos, I found a refuge. It was the New York Public Library. Not the research libraries, but the neighborhood branch where I would take out three or four books each week in a brown paper bag to avoid the comments of my friends who thought I was ''acting white.'' When I felt least wanted by the world, the library became my bridge to self-value.
As I stumbled, on the verge of becoming a statistic in the juvenile justice system, increasingly angry at a world that I felt did not belong to me, the George Bruce branch library on West 125th Street was my home away from home. The 115th Street branch is similarly a sanctuary for residents in its neighborhood.
The library was the one place in my world that I could enter and participate in fully despite empty pockets. In the library stacks I could consider a novel by Gide or Balzac or Hemingway, and join a universe that would otherwise be denied me. There was no way I could have afforded to buy the books.
In the quiet surroundings of the library, I was safe from the hostility that many inner-city children encounter when they look to extend their lives intellectually. And, if the hostility was there when I was a child, how much more do young people face in an age in which the heroes are gangsta rappers?
I speak with thousands of young people around the country each year: youngsters in middle school, high school students and children in juvenile detention centers. I've learned that they all experience a period of transition, a time when they stop thinking of life as something that will happen to them in the future, and start examining where they are in the moment. It is at this time that their lives are most shaped by the reality of their circumstances and by their ability to escape those circumstances by reaching out for ideas that will eventually define their success in life.
For me, at that moment, the library was crucial -- its doors opened onto the American dream. That's why, when I see a neighborhood library closed for years, even temporarily and with the best of intentions, I am troubled. How long can we, in good conscience, keep those doors closed?
A Library Branch Closed for Too Long (3 Letters)
Published: October 30, 2005
To the Editor:
The extended shutdown of the 115th Street branch of the New York Public Library ("Hope Is an Open Book," by Walter Dean Myers, Op-Ed, Oct. 16), in Harlem, is indeed a tragedy for the library users living in this neighborhood.
The 115th Street Branch opened in 1908, and was assigned its first Hispanic librarian, Pura Belpré, in 1925. How can such a vital and important institution be shut down for so long without any plausible reason? Contractors cannot be made the scapegoat of this delay in reopening the library, which has been closed for more than three years.
In 1980, the Countee Cullen branch library had the same experience. We overcame these problems by forming the Countee Cullen Branch Library Support Group. Under the leadership of Mary Redd, we went directly to the source of the problem, which lay at the doorstep of the local legislatures. We found out that the progress of such capital city improvement is buried under tons of unnecessary red tape. It took five years to complete the renovation of the Countee Cullen Branch.
New York City can ill afford to continue dragging its feet when it comes to culture and education for its citizens, especially in one of its most important neighborhoods.
Lloyd Yearwood
Harlem
The writer is chairman, Countee Cullen Branch Library Support Group.
•
To the Editor:
I wholeheartedly concur with Walter Dean Myers. We in the 115th Branch Library Support Group have had meetings with, and written letters and made telephone calls to, library officials to address the issues that Mr. Myers mentioned.
Those issues include: the library being closed for more than three years, with very little renovation work completed up to this time (based on a walk-through of the site); a storefront temporary library that holds no more than 24 people and sometimes has no heat in winter, nor air-conditioning during 95-degree days - and has occasionally had to close as a result.
Since the 115th Street Branch closed, other public library branches have closed for renovations and are already expected to reopen this year: specifically, the 67th Street and Columbus branches.
Our library services 13 schools whose students currently do not have immediate access to its collection! This is why we need our branch library renovation to be put on the front line and not at the end of the line.
Elizabeth Simmonds
Harlem
— Walter Dean Myers
Mew York Times
2005-10-16
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 366
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