Library now cool, but Old Guard wary

The Southeast branch of the D.C. Public Library re-opened June 24 to show off an outstanding interior renovation. The place now has the ambiance of a high-end bookstore. It’s got lots of open space and a sweet new carpet, and the Plexiglas ends of the new bookcases feature colorful graphic designs with lines from The Canterbury Tales.

But, at least as of last week, you couldn’t find an actual copy of The Canterbury Tales at the library.

“One of the reasons it looks beautiful is they got rid of half the shelves,” says Bryce Suderow, a longtime library patron and Hill neighborhood activist. Suderow resents that the library has reduced its number of shelves from 56 to 28 to create that hip atmosphere. “If I were given the choice of this or the old library with all its books, I would choose the old library.”

The new Southeast Neighborhood Library is emblematic of a national movement to make libraries more accessible and appealing to a broader readership. That often means creating open space by reducing the number of shelves.

The Southeast branch was targeted for a makeover by Library Journal magazine before its use as a design showcase for a conference of the American Library Association in June. The side-bonus of a nice neighborhood library for D.C. residents is already paying off. Librarians say there has been a big boost both in book circulation and new membership.

Still, some are wary.

“I hope the advantages, if any, are worth the losses,” says Wendy Blair, president of the Literary Friends of the D.C. Public Library. She says libraries are supposed to be places for books a person wouldn’t buy at a bookstore — things like high literature and encyclopedias.

Nancy Davenport, director of library services, stresses that just because you can’t see the book doesn’t mean the library doesn’t have it.

“The message we’re trying to get across to everybody is that each library is one component of a citywide system,” she says.

Indeed, Hillscape availed himself of the D.C. Public Library’s network and got his hands on a faraway branch’s book less than 24 hours after asking for it.

Another improvement: Davenport says the library has greatly increased its subscriptions to online databases, so the tomes you don’t see may be closer than you think.

As for The Canterbury Tales, there are dozens of volumes in the system, and surely one will make a pilgrimage to the library at 7th Street SE sooner or later. (A borrower may have to ask for it first.)

Bryce Suderow says he’s most unhappy about the diminished Civil War section, which he himself built up over the years by getting library staff to stock books he had helped research. Now he sees his beloved library as an unwelcome place for a Civil War historian such as himself.

“Why would I even come in there if the Civil War section only has one book?” he asks.
 

’Hood dragged into national spotlight

Ten years ago, 8th Street SE was a blighted corridor. Not anymore. In fact, it’s come so far since then that national news broadcasts use it to bludgeon Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.).

First CNN, then CBS, reported in recent weeks that Lewis earmarked $500,000 for “Barracks Row,” which is characterized as too bourgeois to need more money. And there’s a nefarious element: Lewis lives only four blocks away, in a house worth almost a million dollars! And Hill resident Tip Tipton, who sits on the Barracks Row Main Street board of directors, is a lobbyist who has contributed money to Lewis’s campaigns.

Barracks Row Main Street (so named because of the Marine barracks) is the nonprofit organization credited for making 8th Street so nice. In 2005, Barracks Row won an award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation for being a standout among hundreds of Main Street revitalization programs across the country.

Tipton characterizes the nefarious political connections noted by CBS and CNN as “very indirect.”

Barracks Row executive director Cristina Amoruso laments that no reporters called her for the stories. She says 8th Street businesses need promotion because commercial tax assessments for several areas around the Hill, including Barracks Row, jumped 77.7 percent this year, and businesses aren’t drowning in customers. She says the $500,000 sum for improvements at the Eastern Market Metro plaza is “a drop in the bucket.”

Hit the shower, benchwarmers

Seward Square park is busy all day long. People cross through it between home, work and the gym across the street. Some folks walk their dogs, and some folks just idle. Young couples cuddle in the grass, and there’s always a few disheveled men and women sleeping on the benches.

Hit the shower, benchwarmers. Ward 6 D.C. Council member Tommy Wells wants everyone to sit up straight on Seward Square park benches.

Wells wants it because the people who call and e-mail his office want it. In his short time representing Ward 6, Wells has demonstrated a profound commitment to eradicating “quality of life” problems for his constituents.

In terms of legislation, he’s attempted to make street preachers turn down their amplifiers, to make kids get off the street and go home earlier, and to prevent everybody from playing with illegal fireworks (these efforts are pending, failed, and pending, respectively). So far, his sole success in this arena has been to prevent grownups from buying single cans of beer
at any store along the revitalizing H Street corridor.

Regarding Seward Square, located at 4th Street and Seward Square SE and intersected by Pennsylvania Avenue, Wells sent a letter to the National Park Service, which controls the park, to inquire about whether they could retrofit its benches with armrests in the middle so people will be disinclined to recline.

No dice, said the Park Service in a letter to Wells. They don’t have a mechanism for retrofitting benches, and replacing the current benches with the anti-reclining kind is out, too, because each unit costs roughly $2,000.

The next step for the Wells camp, says chief of staff Charles Allen, is to see if Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) can get the money from Congress. In the meantime, several neighbors are eager to start up a bench fund, and Wells’s office is helping coordinate. If they want to replace all 30 benches, that would mean roughly $60,000.

Why all the fuss? The idea is that a place where poor people can lie down is necessarily a breeding ground for crime, although it is not clear that park-related crimes actually precipitated this fussing.

Kelly Branthover, a crime analyst with the Metropolitan Police Department’s First District, reports that the MPD is aware of 15 crimes around Seward Square in the past year, with one deadly-weapon assault.

“People pass through, sleep, they move on,” says Andre Martin, a frequent Seward Square park benchwarmer. He says he spends time here when he’s not doing construction work, but that he doesn’t sleep in the park. He nods knowingly when told that some neighbors don’t want people sleeping on benches. Still, he doesn’t see anything wrong with the situation as it is. “It’s a public park,” he says.