a city reader

THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS

So how come the neighborhood libraries close so early?

When you’ve let the starkness sink in that only 30%, if that, of the city’s poorest kids, black kids mainly, can read well at all, you notice things that bother you. Like neighborhood library hours. The city’s public libraries are open an embarrassing, meager amount of hours. If you were a kid who wanted to get out of the apartment after dinner and meet your friends to study at the local library like kids in Tarrytown do, or to go by yourself to use the library’s computer, or to go to read the new Vogue, good luck. They’re open till 7:00 only two or three nights a week. 7 o’clock? In the city that never sleeps?                                           

What small hours for the big city that’s the cultural capital of the world, that gets dressed up and goes out to those parties you see in Sunday’s Times. You’d think a town with Random House, the Harlem Renaissance, Scholastic, ‘Hamilton’, the 92nd Street Y, Frederick Douglass Boulevard, the New Yorker, would pride itself on being second to none in its library hours. With the rent we pay, with the taxes we pay, the libraries can’t stay open till 9:00 six nights a week and on Sunday like they do in the suburbs? Some days they don’t even open till noon.

The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.

― Ta Nehisi Coates

I see they’re going to name a library uptown after Harry Belafonte. That’s great, New York. The city’s wonderful at surface things like that. New York’s got buildings and streets named after all sorts of people. Roberto Clemente, Golda Meir, Malcolm X, Helen Hayes. They have parties like you see in Sunday’s Times for the naming ceremonies. They air-kiss at those parties.

You wonder why New York doesn’t roll up its expensive shirt sleeves and get at keeping its neighborhood libraries open all day every day and well into the night. I was just in Jackson, Wyoming where I go four times a year because my youngest daughter and three granddaughters live out there. The Teton County Library there opens at 10:00 six mornings a week and just after lunch on Sunday and is open every night. I was talking to one of the librarians in Jackson and she said they’re considering opening at 9:00 in the morning. And this is in Wyoming where they have a cowboy riding a bucking bronco on their license plates.

It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had

cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends. 
― Cynthia Ozick

You wonder why New York City doesn’t have the best library hours of any city. You wonder why it doesn’t have the best reading results in its public schools of all the cities. You’d think the cultural, literate atmosphere of the town would challenge the schools and libraries. You’d think the city’s excellence in publishing and dance and art and theater and architecture and fashion would be reflected in the public schools performance.

You wonder why the paltry hours and the sinful reading levels are not discussed passionately, endlessly in the Times or in the New Yorker. Why was so much space in those publications given to what to do with the books in the basement of the big library on 42^nd Street, and hardy any space given to what to do about how few hours the neighborhood libraries are open? Local papers and magazines give more space to restaurant reviews. More space to those party photos.

Libraries raised me.

--Ray Bradbury

They’re about to pick a book the whole city’s going to read. You’ve seen the promo for it: ONE

BOOK, ONE NEW YORK. They may have already chosen the book by the time you read this. Whichever one gets chosen, it will be a sensitive book, for sure, we’ll all be reading. New York will feel good about itself for its choice. But of course we won’t all be reading the book. 70% of the students in the city’s public schools won’t be able to read it like it was written to be read.

The city voted 90% for Hillary. You would extrapolate from that that in such a town the schools would not let poor kids down and the libraries would not close their doors like they do.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.

--John Lewis

The paltry library hours here tell you something. The city doesn’t care about some things you’d think it would care strongly about. These are libraries we’re talking about. They even have them in Wyoming. These aren’t skateboard parks that some towns emphasize and some don’t. These are libraries. In the publishing capital of the world. In the city where James Baldwin grew up. Where Walt Whitman lived. Where Bernard Malamud wrote The Assistant. Where I used to see Susan Sontag in bookstores. How can it be that the libraries are open less here than in the old inner-ring Cleveland suburb I moved here from 20 years ago?

The sign I hold every weekday for an hour in front of the building downtown where the Department of Education is housed says: WHY NOT TEACH EVERY SCHOOL KID TO READ WELL. You wouldn’t think in New York they’d need to be told that. But you wouldn’t think in New York the libraries would be dark so often either.

When I got my library card, that’s when my life began.

--Rita Mae Brown