Libraries

Today, library hours and services are threatened in municipalities across the country. New York is not exempt, particularly with the proposed City budget cuts. Yet we also read and watch various news reports about increased use of libraries during this current economic downturn.

At The New York Public Library, we're seeing substantial changes in use. Not surprisingly, attendance and circulation are up. Attendance is up by 13% in the last year, and circulation has increased to 21.1 million in 2008, up from 17.2 million in 2007. Users are seeking information to help them through tough times and are also using the Library’s collections and programs as ways to escape from it all.

Three weeks ago, we surveyed participants in public programs and training classes and found that more than one third of them were unemployed and searching for jobs. In the last four months, we have documented an increase of 38% in unique users searching for and using job information on the Library’s website. And from the front lines, Library staff members are reporting increasing questions from users about all kinds of related topics, from unemployment insurance to resumé writing.  read more »

It is hard to believe that we are almost half way through the 2008-09 book discussion at the Tottenville Branch. Tonight we will be discussing All My Sons by Arthur Miller. It is the first time in a long time that we have read a play, so it will be interesting to see how the group reacts. In some ways the play seems to me to be dated, although it is about an issue, manufacturing shoddy military machinery and war profiteering in the U.S. during World War II, a subject that doesn’t seem to be talked or written about much. (Was it a big problem?) I don’t know how the group will react.

They have been pretty pleased with the selections so far: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd.

The most popular title was The Secret Life of Bees with The Memory Keeper’s Daughter a close second. Our next book is Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. This was requested by a number of members of the group.

We’ve been averaging 13.5 people per session, which is a really high number for Tottenville. They are really into it!

If the New Year is to mean anything more than the difference between Wednesday and Thursday, it should contain a bit of reflection on the past, a glance over the shoulder to see where we’ve been and what we’ve done. Since this is a blog about books, reading, and libraries, I thought an examination of my personal reading list during this past year might be interesting. I’m always intrigued by the lists of others--even if, as with the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2008, I’ve only read one of the selections. My average with other people’s favorite movie lists is usually even lower.

Since the number of real bookstores in New York has dwindled to a paltry few, one of the few places left to exercise the fine art of book-browsing is the Mid-Manhattan Library. In fact, most of the books I’ve read this year have been courtesy of my library card. I don’t generally gravitate to the new books section, with their glossy covers, pristine pages, and spines that crack a bit when you open them. I often prefer the excitement of unearthing a hidden gem, a book nobody’s ever heard of or long since forgotten, even if it’s been sitting idly on the shelf for a generation so. That’s how I discovered Something in Disguise, a 1969 novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard, and The Dressmaker, from 1973, by Beryl Bainbridge. Both are dark tales of British social mores, the first about a widow with grown children who marries a pompous bore who just might have a shady side to his nature, the second about a repressed young woman living with her aunts in wartime England. Of course, I could probably have found used paperback copies of both these books on the Internet, if I’d been aware of their existence. But since there is no such thing as browsing books on the Internet, where would I have looked? [Since I read Something in Disguise earlier this year, it seems to have been withdrawn from the Mid-Manhattan library but is still available in the General Research Division's collection.]  read more »

This is a great place, and it is within walking distance of the ferry. I went to movies here as a kid, and it is great to go to it again and see it in good shape! It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but the inside is fabulous! They are putting on a number of different kinds of shows now, including concerts and the occasional play. And they have a working Wurlitzer organ that they play before most performances. For more info on the theater, go to their website:

http://www.stgeorgetheatre.com

And it is right across the street from the St. George Library Center.
 
 
 
 
 

More images after the jump...  read more »

Caption-After School at Kreischerville: children lined up at librarian’s table behind bookwagon.
No date given.

Kreischerville is the next town north of Tottenville, but today it is called Charleston. Kreischerville was named after the owner of a brickyard, an industry that once thrived here as the clay-type soil here was good for making bricks. Some of the excavations were filled in by water and today are called Clay Pit Ponds. Mr. Kreischer’s mansion is still here. It was converted into a restaurant a few years ago, but it is now closed. I believe the brickyards were closed in the 1920s or 1930s.

Picture from NYPL Digital Gallery

Architectural Record has a recurring section called "Building Types Study". The February 2008 issue’s section is dedicated to library design and one of the three libraries discussed is NYPL’s Mulberry Street Branch. The Record commends the architectural firm Roger Marvel Architects for allowing diffused light to penetrate “into both subterranean levels via the central stair”, which it calls “an important psychological feat.”

NYPL’s holdings on the architecture of libraries is fairly broad and historically focused; however Shannon Mattern’s The New Downtown Library seems to consider some of the more pressing concerns (public space, digital technologies, and modern librarianship) of the 21st century. For a more visual take on recent library projects consider Biblioteche: architetture 1995-2005, which offers a brief history lesson on libraries and then considers in some depth around 40 new libraries (renovations & reuse are included) from around the world. Very few are in the United States, which is hardly surprising given the dearth of imaginative thinking and design that goes into public works here (but that’s another post…).

That being said, Biblioteche came out too early to mention the slight redemption that is the OMA-designed Seattle Public Library, which has received accolades from just about every architectural critic (e.g, the late Herbert Muschamp) and librarian (Library Journal chimes in). Luckily, there is now a monograph devoted to the Seattle Public Library (recently brought out by the Barcelona & New York based publisher Actar); and while we don’t have it yet, consider it ordered.

There is a saying that some of the most precious moments in our lives are special just because we didn’t know that they were important at that time.

I mention this because for the past few weeks I’ve been experiencing a resurgence of interest in the topic of famous fires, a subject that has fascinated and haunted me ever since I happened across a book on the topic at the library at MacDill Air Force Base (Tampa, Florida) when I was eleven years old. I remember sitting in the aisle between the shelves, utterly spellbound by black and white photos of the aftermaths of great conflagrations. There I learned for the first time about the Iroquois Theater in Chicago (1903), the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York (1911), and the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston (1942). Even at that age, I could fill the images of the blackened and scorched buildings with visions of crowds of people being burned and trampled as they tried to escape. I saw in my mind’s eye the mingled bravery and helplessness of the firemen and could imagine the unavailing anguish of the victims’ families. I never forgot about that red-covered book whose name I cannot now recall, for it engendered an interest in me that resurfaces whenever a new book is published on the subject of a famous fire.

Habermann, Franz Xaver (1721-1796) - Engraver
“Representation du Feu terrible a Nouvelle Yorck”
In: The Eno Collection of City Views
Published: 1776

Books on Famous Fires

I recently read the books “Chicago Death Trap” and “Tinder box” (both available from New York Public Library), about the Iroquois Theater fire. They are very well written, and it is easy for their readers to imagine themselves in the audience watching the musical comedy “Mister Bluebeard” on that fateful December afternoon shortly after Christmas.

One frame in life’s endless ribbon of events

And here is the core of this entry. The families and couples and shopgirls and children who filled the hall to capacity and beyond that day had no idea while watching a song-and-dance number called “In the Pale Moonlight” that a stage lamp being used to flood the theater with a beautiful blue light was sparking and setting one of the scenery curtains afire. Half an hour after this moment of ignition, over six hundred of the audience would be dead, many more trampled than burned in a terrible stampede to the narrrow exits. I am haunted by this last moment before the fire and the panic. I replay it in my mind’s eye and can iris in like a camera on any and every detail. …The ornate theater, newly opened. Men in celluloid collars and vests sitting next to their wives in corsets, high-button shoes and immense feathered hats. Children excited by the performance or bored and wishing they were home playing with their new toys. Audience members standing behind the last rows of seats or sitting in the aisles. The excited cast and crew members backstage readying sets, props and costumes. The gasps of wonder from the viewers as the theater fills with artificial “moonlight”. Aerialist Nellie Reed waiting high above the stage, ready to swing out over the audience during her number where she’ll scatter flower petals over the crowd. (She will be one of the few cast members to perish when she is forgotten on her perch after the fire breaks out.)… It’s all so poignant and pregnant with portent … to me, because I know what’s going to happen next! None of the people there in the theater that afternoon knew that they would soon be fighting for their lives. Until the fire brought its tragedy, this was an average performance in a typical theater for everyday people. I use my imagination to crystallize a moment into a myth that is very powerful for my mental picture of the world. I can put myself virtually into the audience and freeze that instant in time, viewing it from every angle. But in real life, this is just one “frame” in life’s endless ribbon of events, no more or less special than any other.

I know that events can’t really be frozen into a bell jar or vitrine. Logic says that there was nothing remarkable about the last distribution of pay envelopes that Saturday afternoon at the Triangle factory, or singer Goodie Goodell playing the piano atop a revolving platform that night in the Melody Lounge at the Cocoanut Grove. But I choose, emotionally, to focus on and reflect on them, combing them for meaning and sometimes being reduced to tears at the evocative power of their sheer ordinariness. To return to the theme of this post, these things and moments were special because they were not important at their time. I have the luxury of living later and being able to “stop the film”, so to speak. The people caught up in these events were forced into and through them and did not have this choice. Maybe this is why I think so much about them.

The Burning of Rome : descriptive march and two-step / E. T. Paull, c1903
From the “Treasures of the Performing Arts” digital project