Sorry, pardon the virtual mess. Pull up a virtual pew and let’s get started. If you’ve just got here, we’re talking about Better Together, I’m in that room talking about the Introduction, and I’m over there talking about Valley Interfaith, and here I am talking about Chapter Two, “Branch Libraries”. I hope you’re in all three places as well.
It’s tempting to get distracted into a fascinating conversation about libraries generally, and about bookstores, and their roles in culture and in cities. But that’s not today. Today we’re talking about the Chicago Public Library, and in particular, the Near North Branch. Which is closed on Sundays. Ooh. Anyway, Chicago has seventy-five neighborhood libraries. For comparison, Chicago has three million residents and a metropolitan constituency of nine million or so: Philadelphia with only one and a half million residents and a metro of six million has fifty five. On the other hand, Los Angeles has three and a half million residents, and a metro area of sixteen million, and only seventy branches. Houston, two million and four metro, has forty. So branches aren’t conspicuously thick on the ground there. Which isn’t the point anyway, I had just wondered.
OK, a general comment before some questions. Did it bother any of y’all that the book doesn’t recognize that Cabrini Green isn’t just a bad neighborhood “known especially for its grim, high-rise public housing, for empty lots, gang violence, and run-down schools.” It’s infamous. It’s probably the most notorious bad neighborhood in the country, certainly up there with South Central LA, and Bed-Stuy. I have no idea whether it deserved the reputation it had, but in the early nineties, Cabrini Green dominated the discussion of city planning, urban poverty, public housing, and HUD. The National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, under Our Only President’s Father, and the HOPE VI programs under Bill Clinton (and not yet, I believe, entirely destroyed) came about as a response to Cabrini Green and other similar but less well-known ‘projects’ striking serious fear into the hearts of affluent white suburbanites. Ultimately, the country came up with money to blow up the high-rise buildings and start again. Bill Clinton and Henry Cisneros, and even Jack Kemp made a big deal about this. The new library at Near North comes in that context, and I think the book downplays it.
OK, some questions:
First, the “third place” issue. More generally, is a library a building to house books, or is it a neighborhood center? I like the idea of using the library as a neighborhood center, because (a) there should be more places to use that way, and libraries are there, and (2) I love books and reading, and bringing people together near books might just, well, it sounds silly when I put it that way. Anyway, in my little town there is a recreation center and a library, and they are not far apart but not really near each other, and the rec center is (I think) used mostly for sports-related things, and a discussion group or similar would meet at the library. Which makes sense, but does the duplication of conference rooms and such make economic sense? I like sports, too, and it’s far more likely that people will say “that seems like a fun activity” while walking past the pool or the baseball fields, rather than the book stacks. Not to mention that the other city buildings often used for such things; bringing people onto high school campuses is important, too.
This brings up another question: is what Chicago is doing a good use of city funds? I mean, we are talking about a lot of money, although the book downplays this. What else could they be funding with that money? How are the schools’ budgets? How’s law enforcement doing? How about public transportation? The roads and bridges? I think that the Near North Branch is a story about a city intelligently throwing money at a problem, and I, for one, would be happy to pay more in taxes to make that possible, but I make libraries a high priority anyway.
Third point: this seems like a deliberate attempt by a city to create social capital. That is, the long-term plan of the city places value on social networks and ‘third places’. How, exactly, did they sell that? Or did nobody notice? I can’t imagine the mayor of Boston making a pitch for a networked library system by emphasizing the value of having the librarians know the school principals, and of putting reading in the public domain. I imagine he would emphasize standardized test scores, and jobs, and perhaps fighting gang violence. I don’t know if the book is showing a fair picture, but it does seem to suggest that a city can decide to invest resources in building social networks, and actually achieve it. Pretty cool.
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-Vardibidian.
One of the things that struck me was the paragraph on pp. 41-42 about the attendant gentrification, especially because Putnam and Feldstein treat it in such an understated fashion (paralleling V.’s point on the neighborhood of Cabrini Green). It seems to me that the drifting away of adults who were involved in the planning (p.40) is also telling that at least some of the commitment to the library isn’t sustained as the institution grows. I don’t really know all the details of housing in Chicago so maybe there aren’t that many people displaced by the gentrification of this area of Cabrini Green. I guess I just wanted to say that I think Near North is a fantastic thing, bringing in lots of people who are transformed by their access to assistance, computers, books, but also for me an example that you can’t just focus on bringing a neighborhood up. It’s great that the City built a park on the liquor store grounds–I’m in favor of green space–but did they also plan mixed use/mixed income housing or social services for this area? (I reiterate, I feel antagonistic about it mainly because the authors gloss over it and not because I know the Chicago situation.)The deepest pockets of poverty seem to be growing and separating from the rest of society. It seems to me that the authors seem to assume that this is not part of the social capital equation, sort of a “the poor are always with us” and it’s someone else’s job to study what happens to them.
Hm. As it happens, I’m interested in the way that our poverty policies can incorporate the ideas of social capital. We didn’t make a big enough deal about our successes in fighting concentrated poverty in the 1990s, so when we abandoned the most succesful policies, everybody pretty much shrugged. So I was also put off by the authors refusal to address the issue, although of course they wanted to emphasize the libraries.
I wonder how our own library serves as a ‘third place’; mostly I see it as a meeting place for parents with children (and no workplaces), but then I don’t go to the evening events, where that would happen.
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-V.