Jennifer Vogel [2]

On the third floor of the temporary library in downtown Minneapolis—a retrofitted office building that once housed the Federal Reserve Bank—a skinny man with a shock of white hair paced hurriedly up and down the aisles carrying a bouquet of roses wrapped in a wad of shredded newspaper. He looked disheveled, a little like Sam Shepard on a bad day or, maybe, Hume Cronyn on a good day. Though I hadn’t set foot inside the main library for years, I recognized the man immediately as one of the usual cast of unusual characters that inhabit the downtown branch.

What the man was doing with the roses was a source of speculation, as was his reason for walking back and forth, over and over, past the same aisles of books. And then, finally, he darted right and disappeared. The man, it turned out, had been waiting for an open seat along the floor’s west wall, where large windows overlook Cancer Survivors Park, with its pathways and small grove of birch trees. Along the wall, apparently cherished among library regulars, there is a row of tables and chairs where mostly men sit and read newspapers or books about collecting baseball cards or negotiating real estate contracts. Everyone with their passions and projects and secret missions. Two mustachioed friends, maybe brothers, spoke Spanish over a vocabulary book. At another station, a would-be professor with white paint splattered on his jeans worked feverishly on a series of handwritten documents, a dense manifesto. Beside a stack of yellow legal pads, there were a packet of Kleenex, a driver’s license, and a Social Security card aligned perfectly with the edge of the table. A few places down, the man with the roses sat erect and gazed outside, flowers in hand. He watched as working men lowered windows from the roof of the new Cesar Pelli-designed main library across the park, just a block away. He leaned in slightly for a sniff.

As I looked down the line, at the faces gazing out the window or nosing through books, it struck me that none of these people would have been sitting here, would never have enjoyed such a pleasant view, when the temporary library was still the Federal Reserve Bank. The opportunity to gaze down at birch trees, to watch myriad passersby, would have been reserved for managers and executives. Higher-ups. Bureaucrats. But at the library, things are more democratic.

In fact, the library is the ultimate democratic institution. A person, with or without a library card, can hang around all day long, assuming her beverage has a lid on it, without buying anything or being subjected to a single ad. There are no greeters at the door to acknowledge and assess incoming patrons. On the contrary, library staffers understand that this is your place as much as it is theirs, and you may go about your business fully ignored, which ought to be every person’s right. Unless, of course, you need assistance in finding a book about kite-building, or the ownership tentacles of General Electric. Then, you will have at your disposal a dozen experts, better versed than Google in locating what you need from an enormous store of books, magazines, newspapers, DVDs, videos, CDs, pictures, government documents, pamphlets, websites, and even microfiche. If you don’t remember microfiche, it’s the silent film of information technology, crooked photographs of documents that existed before electronic databases and must be viewed through a special, old-timey machine. There is no keyword search in a microfiche document, no clicking down. Just a reel that sends the pages scrolling by at various speeds.

Libraries are the face of government as it existed before we started hating government and, therefore, ourselves. It is munificent in the way public agencies simply aren’t anymore. A librarian isn’t going to arrest you. Nor is she or he going to tell you, thumb driving back like an umpire’s, two years and you’re off welfare! There is no punitive or moralistic aspect to the library, only trust and goodwill. The library says, Here, please take any of our millions of volumes for free. We trust you to make good use of them. We trust you to bring them back. All you need is an ID and maybe a phone bill and you’re in.

These are places for people who want to know; libraries nationwide have seen a steady increase in patronage since at least 1990. They hold a special and sentimental place in the minds of the citizenry and are widely regarded as institutions where browsing and borrowing lead to meaningful knowledge. According to a 2003 study from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, ninety-four percent of Americans rate their local public library as “very valuable” or “valuable.” The majority even said they’d pay more taxes to support libraries—an average of forty-nine dollars more per year. Currently, taxpayers spend around twenty-five dollars per person, the approximate cost of one new, hardcover book.

Despite that kind of passionate support, libraries everywhere are falling on hard times. The American Library Association (co-founded back in 1876 by Melville Dewey, namesake of the venerable Dewey decimal system) reports budget cuts of up to fifty percent in at least forty-one states. That means reduced staff and operating hours, and fewer new books on the shelves. In John Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, California, the city’s three libraries will soon close their doors altogether. Minnesota, long a state that prioritized education and literacy, has hardly taken an enlightened view. Across the state, libraries are paring back essential services, thanks to reductions in state funds to cities and counties.

In 2003, Governor Tim Pawlenty dramatically reduced local government aid in response to a projected state budget deficit. This, rather than violate a no-new-taxes promise he made during his gubernatorial campaign. Those cuts directly impacted libraries, in some cases brutally. When local governments are forced to cut services, libraries seem like an easy target; people get a lot more exercised about police and firefighters and schools. It’s a pattern in nearly all fifty states, and throughout Minnesota. St. Paul, to secure future funding, created a library board and a dedicated city property tax. Ramsey County closed its North St. Paul branch and, in 2003, saw a forty percent reduction in its book budget. Hennepin County, until recently, kept six of its libraries closed on Fridays.

Minneapolis was hit especially hard. Because the city’s library board operates independently of the City Council, its budget is less flexible than, say, that of the Public Works Department. Up until the cuts, more than forty percent of the library system’s $20 million budget came from local government aid. Now, some branches are open only three days a week. Money for new books was reduced dramatically: from $2.6 million in 2000 to $1.9 million in 2004. Minneapolis must now rely more heavily on less predictable private funding sources, along with the determined efforts of Friends of the Library organizations.

“I think libraries are very invisible,” said Minneapolis Library Director Kit Hadley. “I think they have been taken for granted. There have been people who support libraries, but it’s nobody’s big cause.” Yet, she continued, sounding more ardent than your stereotypical librarian, “Libraries are fundamental institutions in a democracy. We talk about the value and importance of libraries in promoting the information necessary to active self-governance, the notion that this kind of availability and discourse is necessary for democracy to be alive. And all of us on the staff feel very strongly about that.”

It’s easy to be discouraged by the notion that nobody seems to read anymore. There is a distinctly anti-intellectual atmosphere circulating in a country that has a tradition of skepticism toward high-minded ideas. These days, more than ever, being American means making decisions with our guts, not our heads. It has culminated in a president who brags about not reading newspapers and is referred to in international circles as the “Texas twit.” In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts produced a study that showed a dramatic decline in the reading of literature, with fewer than half of American adults bothering to pick up a novel. NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, sounding a little like Kit Hadley, said, “This report documents a national crisis. Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life. As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent minded.”

No doubt there is a relationship between the decline in reading and the increase in societal fear and jingoism. As a person learns more about the rest of the world, enlightenment and tolerance tend to follow. Higher levels of education mitigate prejudice and increase the support for civil liberties. “These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose,” said Gioia.

According to the study, the steepest decline in readership—twenty-eight percent since 1982—was found among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. That could be due largely to increased reading on the web, which is hardly the same as illiteracy. But if people are getting most of their information from the Internet, where bright screens and blinking ads make it unpleasant to absorb stories of length, then we are in trouble. Reading online is simply different than reading on paper: It tires out the eyes, and encourages scanning rather than lingering. There is also a tendency, with this active medium, to be in a hurry—we want to move on, get to the next page or site—which is why web pages are often composed of short, multiple bits of information. So, while the Internet provides a reading experience that is a mile wide and an inch deep, the library offers selections and opportunities that are a mile wide and a mile deep. There is real serenity to be found in rooms lined with books, good and bad, old and new, where we sit surrounded by the collected knowledge and history of civilization. Inside the library, we are encouraged to stick around and explore and spontaneously discover—to think. Even if we walk through its doors only once a year, it’s crucial that our profound collective memory be maintained.

Of course, nowadays, books are no longer enough. Libraries have evolved into “information centers,” which means information in forms beyond those weighty volumes imprinted with cryptic Dewey decimal numbers. To that end, there is not a single thing that’s depressing about Hennepin County’s new, state-of-the-art Brookdale library. It’s located in Brooklyn Center, a diverse inner-ring suburb. Open since last May and designed by Abraham, Buetow, and Associates, the building is airy, with lots of glass and a whimsical roof shaped like a squashed cake.

Inside, amid comfy stuffed chairs, the clientele moved to and fro with armloads of books. When an older woman wearing a purple knit cap fed a pile of paperbacks into the book-return slot, a recorded male voice responded, “Thanks for using the library.” A bookish boy with straw-yellow hair and wire-rimmed glasses browsed the history section while a librarian guided him, creating a scene that would have sent Norman Rockwell scrambling for a brush. Two black girls slouched silently at a table in the teen area, engrossed in science texts. (Libraries these days all seem to have snappily designed but somewhat wrongheaded sections for teenagers—in browsing through the teen CD collection, I found Jewel and––sorry, middle-aged Boss fans––loads of Bruce Springsteen.) When I witnessed a small boy actually begging his mother to stay “just five minutes more,” I realized that I hadn’t felt so optimistic about humanity since before the last presidential election.

Taking part in the overall congeniality were rows of people of all races sitting in front of banks of new Dell flat-screen monitors attached to high-speed web connections. Some offered home pages in various languages: Hmong, Khmer, Russian, Somali, Spanish, and Vietnamese. These people had business to take care of, and they either couldn’t or preferred not to take care of it at home. It’s easy to assume that everyone has a computer and an Internet connection, but that’s simply not the case. Hadley, responding to those who think libraries are bound to go the way of leech therapy and Roman bathhouses, said the digital age “won’t transform the basic role of the library, which is about promoting knowledge and literacy. It’s just changing how we do that. We are playing an incredibly important role in terms of pure access. The digital divide is very serious.”

As always, librarians have stepped into the role of discerning gatekeeper—especially useful in the online world, which can seem a bit like, well, a Roman bathhouse. Janet Leick, who until January was interim library director for Hennepin County, proudly noted that libraries have created databases of reliable web information for research and homework. “We have pulled together websites that our librarians have examined and know the sources and authenticity of, and created subject databases. Coming into the e-library, you have access to all these databases.” She said use of this information has increased twenty-two percent over the past year or so, and use of the library’s own website and online catalog has gone up even more—thirty-one and seventy percent, respectively.

Google caused a sensation recently when it promised to further expand the virtual library idea by scanning and posting online millions of books from research institutions like Harvard—at least older titles whose copyrights have expired. Yet even this amazing development will not eliminate the need for librarians and brick and mortar buildings. Ever try to read an entire book on a computer screen? And what if Google someday decides to charge for access to all those digital files?


In the U.S. and Europe during the 1800s, when libraries became popularized and expanded beyond the collections of philosophers, aristocrats, and academics, the big thinkers of the day determined that widespread access to books—made possible by improved printing technologies—would bring nothing but good to society. They argued that reading would introduce the “radical poor” into a culture of decency and prosperity, and allow them to better understand and accept the principles of capitalism. According to this new wisdom, enlightenment would save all humankind, no longer just the elite. Said the British trade unionist Francis Place, “As a man’s understanding is directed to some laudable pursuit, his desire for information will increase; he will become decent in his conduct and language, sober, discreet … such a man will frequently rise as the uninformed man sinks.” Others argued that reading offered regular people an escape from everyday drudgery, a means of reflection and appreciation that would form the very foundation of a civil and altruistic society.

Dukes and popes once built public libraries to influence general opinion, amass power, or improve their legacies. (American presidents still do this, post-administration.) Modern libraries fulfill a very different purpose. They belong to the public, serving as education and community centers, information hubs, hangouts and study halls, living rooms, or even coffee shops, without the volcanic hisses of steaming milk. They are the ultimate “third place,” a crucial alternative to both home and work. They are also, like parks and schools, a binding force in society. As the life of the individual becomes more private and solitary, working from home, playing computer games late into the night, ordering everything from sofas to pizzas online—Why go to the library when I can have a book delivered to my door? you might ask—our society becomes fragmented. Public places are where we see one another and adjust to living together. We develop genuine, shared experiences by interacting with each other in a broader community.

The industrialist Andrew Carnegie built thousands of libraries at the turn of the twentieth century, mostly throughout the United States and the British Isles. It’s possible that he sought historical redemption for the rough manner in which some of his factory workers were treated. But the main reason for this burst of altruism was that Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who scraped his way to the top, believed that education and assimilation were necessary in order for immigrants to succeed in American society, which he deemed a meritocracy. In his mind, libraries provided the perfect, public opportunity for anyone with “good within them and ability and ambition to develop it” to become prosperous and even unabashedly rich. “In a public library,” Carnegie once wrote, “men could at least share cultural opportunities on a basis of equality.” In other words, with access to books, character alone would determine one’s destiny.

While our society acts less like a meritocracy than it used to, Carnegie’s ideas about libraries are still valid, especially their importance to the large number of immigrants moving to Minnesota and other states. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than thirty percent of Minneapolis and St. Paul residents are nonwhite. Sixteen percent are foreign-born. Around twenty percent of Twin Citizens speak a language other than English at home. And there stands the library, with books and newspapers and computer homepages in a dozen different languages, with English-language learning groups, and computer classes in Spanish and Russian and Hmong.

State Senator Steve Kelley of Hopkins, a rare champion of the library system, noted that since St. Louis Park is home to a large number of Russians, “That library developed a Russian-language collection for those folks. Some of those immigrants can stay in touch with the culture of their former countries and also get helped along in adapting to the culture of the U.S.”

Notions like assimilating immigrants, protecting access to information, and working to inform the public in myriad ways—have come to seem radical in an era of government secrecy. Just after the September 11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft directed federal agencies to intentionally stall in releasing public documents requested under the longstanding federal Freedom of Information Act until “full and deliberate” consideration could be given to possible impacts. That was a reversal of the policy set by his predecessor, Janet Reno, which placed the burden on agencies to show why they had withheld particular documents. Then, the next month, President George W. Bush signed an executive order restricting access to historical presidential papers, likely to protect the reputations of his father and the so-called Bush Dynasty.

In fact, libraries have themselves become radical entities. The American Library Association recently filed a brief with the District of Columbia Circuit Court attempting to learn the makeup of the controversial and clandestine National Energy Policy Development Group that Vice President Dick Cheney convened in 2001. It sided against the USA Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the government’s ability to collect personal information, including a library patron’s activities. As soon as an unofficial draft of the bill was available, the ALA called on a group of experts to pick it over. They objected to increased access to library records, new computer-monitoring strategies, and an expanded definition of the word “terrorist.” The ALA organized a phone campaign and worked with U.S. Senator Russ Feingold to introduce privacy-protection amendments to the bill. In the end, the amendments failed. So, these days, many libraries go to great lengths, with signs and homepage notations, to alert patrons to new privacy infringements.

Locally, the Minneapolis library board fought efforts to impose filtering technologies on library computers, despite the fact that, on occasion, patrons and librarians wound up exposed to pornography. (In 2003, the city paid a $435,000 settlement to twelve librarians who, in anomalous fashion, claimed a “hostile workplace.”) In defending unfettered access to data, the board has argued that filtering technologies are imperfect, often barring non-pornographic sites while allowing triple-X pornography to slip though. In the end, Minneapolis installed filtering programs because of a Bush administration requirement aimed at shielding the eyes of children. If a library wants federal funding, the law says, it must employ filters. (Truly brave adult patrons can still request filterless browsing.) Hadley told the press, “This borders on feeling like extortion.”

No doubt, radical librarians don’t exactly endear the library system to the current administration—or to some of the public, for that matter—but that’s what makes their efforts so important. “In general, it has been libraries, among other institutions, that have defended access to all kinds of information, including unpopular information,” said Hadley. “Some of those issues have now taken center stage, because of the Children’s Internet Protection Act and the Patriot Act. Some are tough issues and some aren’t. I think that our board feels very strongly about the importance of intellectual freedom in terms of democracy in action.”


Minneapolis’ central library is the premier public library in Minnesota. The crown jewel of the city’s network, it stands guard over more than two million books, compared to St. Paul’s one million. And at a time when many libraries are bowing to popular tastes and going the Blockbuster route—spending money on endless copies of books like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—Minneapolis puts a priority on titles that are culturally important but less often borrowed. The city owns more than one million unique titles, more by far than any other in the state, except for a few university libraries (which most of us don’t have access to). So, when Duluth calls looking for The History of the World by Sir. Walter Raleigh, Minneapolis obligingly sends it out. In this way, the downtown library acts as repository for the entire state, maintaining a distinguished permanent collection so other libraries don’t have to.

It makes sense, then, that Minneapolis’ main library should be widely cherished, that it should be the loveliest and most generously funded in Minnesota. Indeed, the new building going up on Hennepin Avenue has raised eyebrows because, to some, the expenditure feels extravagant, what with recent budget tightening and, especially, reduced operating hours at many library branches. The central library itself typically operates just seven hours per day and is closed on Sundays; considering Minneapolis’ across-the-board financial troubles, there is no telling how often the new building will be open. A frugal person might wonder: Why not just leave the main branch in the Federal Reserve Bank, or retrofit some other existing structure, maybe in the warehouse district? After all, St. Paul makes do with a building that’s almost a century old. (The city just spent $15.9 million to renovate it.)

The answer to that query is this: In 2000, the citizens of Minneapolis voted to build a new library. Now well under way, the structure is largely funded by a $140 million city referendum that passed by a two-to-one margin. Times were still flush back then, and the state was footing a significant portion of the system’s operating budget. So generous, educated, liberal Minneapolis specified that the referendum money could only be spent on a showpiece central library, and to improve various community branches, such as the north side’s newly renovated Sumner Library. If people want to gripe about poor decision-making, they should point the finger at the geniuses who moved the main library out of its original location on Tenth and Hennepin, a castle-like structure that strongly resembled the Lumber Exchange Building. They plunked it down in a 1960s-era box that was difficult to expand or update and constructed in such a way as to hold together for only forty years.

Anyway, Minneapolis, for better or worse, has always chased the future more ardently than St. Paul. It’s no shock that when policy makers noticed state-of-the-art architectural wonders going up in cities all over the country—including the exotic Rem Koolhaas-designed library in Seattle—they wished to express their own dedication to literacy combined with high-tech ingenuity. It was a matter of civic pride. If all goes well, the library will be heavily used and a magnet for increased private donations, rather than becoming a beautiful memorial to a dead and bygone era. An exquisite corpse, like the Mill City Museum.

The new library, which is scheduled to open in the spring of 2006, aspires to be inspiring. It will act as a multifaceted community hub with an auditorium, meeting rooms, learning materials in twenty different languages, wireless Internet access, and almost two hundred new computers with—and this is important—room for hundreds more. There will be public art, a café, and the city’s first municipal “green roof,” planted with flowers and prairie grass. The purpose is to reduce storm-water runoff and, because rain gets filtered through the various plants, pollution levels.

At 365,000 square feet, the library will be spacious enough to give fingertip access to more than fifty percent of its titles, compared with fifteen percent at the old main library, making pneumatic tubes, endearing as they were, obsolete. The assumption, or at least the hope, is that there will be enough money—likely from private sources—to purchase an impressive “opening day collection,” which, according to fund-raising materials, would make Minneapolis’ the fourth-largest central public library collection in the United States.

Inside, the design includes “elemental” materials such as light maple paneling and homey touches like fireplaces and lounge furniture. Daylight will be a chief source of illumination, thanks to high-tech, floor-to-ceiling windows, some of which are etched with pixilated images of trees or snow. As long as the man with the roses doesn’t plunk down in front of one of those, he should be quite taken with the views of downtown. And, with luck, he will realize one of the true assets of a structure such as this, both from the inside and the outside: beauty. The library will be useful, but it will also reflect a community investment in the creative and the intangible. It will be a monument to ideas. Cities are not made only of concrete and girders, after all; they are also built of imagination.

In 2003, at a meeting where the Minneapolis library board was discussing how to absorb an expected $4.5 million cut in state aid, a woman named Margaret Howes posed a simple question of Kit Hadley. How much, she wondered, would each person in Minneapolis have to pay in order to make up for the deficit? Hadley whipped out her calculator and came up with a figure of twelve dollars. Twelve measly dollars. Less than a typical month’s fees at the video store. Less than the cost of a babysitter. Less than regular Internet access. Certainly, less than the price of not having books widely available.

Throughout history, people have risked everything to publish and protect books. They’ve slaved to rebuild libraries destroyed by those who would stifle free thought. And when circumstances dictated, people learned to read in the dark, in fear and secrecy. In Black Boy, Richard Wright’s autobiographical novel, the author describes wanting to read so badly as a seventeen year old that he convinced a white man to allow him to check out books under his name. This was the Jim Crow South and most libraries were off limits to blacks, especially blacks who wanted to read H.L. Mencken. He tells of standing at the counter, pretending to be on an errand for the white man, nervously trying to look as “unbookish” as possible so he wouldn’t be thrown out. When interrogated by a suspicious librarian, he claimed, petrified, “Oh, no, ma’am. I can’t read.”

Yet now, when the admirable mission of libraries is in jeopardy, when one of the few stations of government that is open to all, that helps us to become better people and improves society, needs money; when this basic pillar of democracy is under siege, our state politicians are too concerned with reelection to lend a hand. In applying the cold standard of business-like efficiency to government, they ignore the fact that many important, even essential, things can’t be measured in dollars.

And so these legislators leave libraries, including the Minneapolis library—the very fulcrum of the statewide system, the one on which we locals are already spending $140 million—to go begging. These lofty institutions are forced to kneel down and grovel, asking citizens for twelve dollars each.