Cherishing Our Shared History, Embracing Our Vibrant Future

Hamline Midway Library Association Letter on Library CIB Proposal

The Hamline Midway Branch library is the heart of our neighborhood. We, of the Hamline Midway Library Association, are surprised to realize that as library services have evolved, our ideas about how to keep that heart of the neighborhood strong have changed as well! We want to express our support for a new building for our branch. This is a letter to share our perspectives and experiences.

Library Love logo created by Jun-Li Wang

Dear Hamline Midway Library Community,

As the Hamline Midway Library Association, we have worked since 2009 to protect and uplift a vibrant, full-service library in our community. We believe our library should serve everyone from babies to elders and that it should be accessible, inviting, and welcoming to all. We’ve served the library through fundraising, pollinator garden maintenance, advocacy, promotion of library-sponsored events, and science and arts programming for adults, children, and families. We’ve invested money donated by you, the community, in a microphone and amplifier for the library, a new bench on the grounds, garden improvements, and furnishings for the teen area.

This year, our city is heading into the highly competitive, bi-annual Capital Improvement Budget (CIB) process, in which city departments request funding to build or improve parks, rec centers, fire stations and police stations, public works projects, and libraries.

As part of that process, our community is being asked to consider two different proposals put forward by the library administration: to spend roughly $3 million to renovate the existing Hamline Midway Library building, or spend roughly $8 million to construct a new facility on the site of the existing building. The proposal for the CIB process is due April 2, 2021, and city officials are gathering public input about funding priorities now via this survey. We encourage community members to fill out the survey and mark the library projects being proposed as the highest priority for funding in the CIB process; this will help make the library’s proposals competitive for the very limited CIB dollars available.

Members of the Hamline Midway Library Association have poured countless volunteer hours into protecting and uplifting this library. We’ve engaged with neighbors, librarians, and city officials about the library for over a decade. We’ve consulted with our own hearts and with one another. We have concluded that as much as we love our current building, a new building would better serve our heartfelt goal: a community with a library that is vibrant, welcoming, inviting, and useful for a wide range of age groups, now and well into the future.

We dream of a library that is more reflective of our beautifully diverse communities, a library that says loud and clear that new and long-time residents, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, youth, and members of the disability community are vital contributors to the story of our community. We dream of a library that invites the participation of people of varying abilities with dignity, accessibility, and ease, where access is an intentional part of the design and not an after-thought. We dream of a library that is a great place to work for our hard-working librarians. We dream of a library that is environmentally sustainable. We dream of an improved library that can be achieved as efficiently as possible, so we can all enjoy it in just a few years and not in a few decades. And we feel that as bittersweet as saying goodbye to our old library building would be, saying hello to a new library, one that integrates the story of the old library into the life of the new, would be the best way to gain the kind of library we dream of for our community.

Investment in Our Library: Overdue and Desperately Needed

City investment in our library is decades overdue. These proposals have been many years in the making and have been informed by community input over at least a decade, if not longer. Most recently, the St. Paul Public Library (SPPL) collected community input in 2018 to inform the system’s strategic direction and in 2019 to inform its facilities direction. The system-wide engagement process also included seven pop-up community meetings across St. Paul led by youth from Juxtaposition Arts’ Tactical Urbanism Program, which used art, design, and other practices to amplify voices that often go unheard in community processes and to interrupt longtime patterns of disinvestment in St. Paul neighborhoods. Young people in the program met St. Paul residents outside library branches, on buses and light rail stops, and at local festivals to gather their opinions about libraries.

In January 2020, SPPL invited our community to come to the library in person to share thoughts about use and needs, to help SPPL develop an updated facilities plan. Many neighbors shared fresh thoughts and ideas as we dreamed about the future of our neighborhood library. It was an exciting meeting to be part of as it was proof that the SPPL system intended to invest in our Hamline Midway Library!

For many neighbors, the current proposals about a beloved institution like our library may feel as if they’re coming from out of nowhere — even if that’s not exactly the case. We, too, were surprised to see that the SPPL was offering the two options of either renovating or building a new library. We are all feeling varying degrees of unsettled, exhausted, and on-edge due to the stresses of the pandemic, the uprising last summer in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the ongoing uncertainties engendered by the Derek Chauvin trial, and the mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities suffering disproportionately through these challenges. We’re dealing with feeling profoundly disconnected during the pandemic from many of the routines, rituals, and traditions that have given many of our lives stability. It’s been hard on so many not to be able to access in-person services at the library such as printers, fax machines, wi-fi, and other resources. It doesn’t help matters that meaningful, face-to-face public engagement is so difficult this year due to COVID-related limitations on gathering in person.

Naturally, any proposal to change the library coming at a time like this — even if that proposal is to invest millions of dollars in this beloved community asset — is going to stir up strong feelings. As people who have loved up the library and our neighborhood right alongside many of you, the members of the Hamline Midway Library Association are holding all these feelings with tenderness and care, feeling all the feelings right along with you, and hoping that we can come through this process a stronger, more connected neighborhood — because right now, we all need each other to get through the many challenges our communities face.

Our Branch’s History

It was neighbors, not the city, who first got a library launched in our neighborhood in 1908, when local mothers opened a volunteer-run, penny-a-book lending library in a millinery shop on Snelling Avenue, on the spot where Lloyd’s Pharmacy is now being rebuilt.

Neighbors raised the money to purchase the land at what’s now 1558 West Minnehaha Avenue.

And when the city failed to move forward on library construction, it was neighbors who brought forward a lawsuit, which led to funds donated from the Judge Henry Hale estate being used to finally build our library. The library had its grand opening in October 1930.

In the decades after the library opened, neighbors successfully organized to fight off several attempts by officials to close our library when times got tough.

In 2009, after yet another failed attempt to close our library, a group of us library lovers formed as the Hamline Midway Library Association, with the mission of keeping a vibrant, full-service, welcoming library in our neighborhood, now and forever.

The Challenges of Our Current Building

Through years of fighting for our library and volunteering at our library, HMLA members have built relationships with the branch managers and librarians. We heard from them about the challenges they faced in working at our branch, such as the security issues posed by the basement and all its odd nooks and crannies. We heard about the waterfalls that spilled down the wall into the men’s bathroom when it rained hard, and the difficulties of offering dignified accessibility to the basement auditorium and bathrooms. We saw how branch managers like Marchelle Hawkins worked to do outreach to under-served communities but still faced so many challenges in bringing new users through the library front door. We heard branch manager Mark Kile bemoan the drinking fountain that didn’t meet accessibility standards.

As much as we personally love this cozy, historic building, we couldn’t help noticing the features many other libraries have, such as teen-friendly spaces and dedicated homework help spaces, that our library currently doesn’t.

That got us thinking. What would it be like if our library could offer more youth-friendly space, more quiet homework help spaces, and flexible meeting spaces for neighborhood entrepreneurs and community groups? What if the library design could integrate the cozy, classic elements many of us love with more youth-friendly design features? We also reflected on the ongoing conversations in our community about how our city can stop centering able-bodied white people’s comfort as the highest priority and make room for a wider variety of cultures, backgrounds, and needs, so that we can all thrive and feel welcomed and valued.

Like the rest of you, we’ve also mourned not being able to go into our library for over a year now. The lack of an integrated air exchange in the HVAC system has made it unsafe for patrons to use the building during COVID.

Thoughts on Proposed Plans

As we contemplate how to support a thriving, vibrant library for our community, we’re aware that many of our neighbors hold a strong value around historic preservation in St. Paul and are advocating for renovation of the current library building. We share their love of this library’s history. But in this case, we are guided most strongly by the question, “What is going to give us the strongest possible library?” And, initially surprising even ourselves, we realized we believe the opportunity a new building presents is the best option for the neighborhood. What we are hoping for, if the decision is made to build a new library, is a community process that allows ample space to process our feelings about the building, gather and preserve stories and memories, celebrate the spirit of this place and what it has meant to our community, and find ways to commemorate and extend its history in a new building.

We also respect the stance of neighbors who are advocating for a third option that the SPPL has not proposed: to keep the current library building standing and repurpose it for other uses, possibly renting it to a community group or non-profit, and to push the city to invest in a new joint-use recreation center and library located near Hamline Elementary School.

Unfortunately, we believe it’s unlikely that many groups would want to take on the challenge of renting a building with accessibility issues, air circulation issues, water damage, and security challenges. Any group using the building would still be impacted by the current problems and rough shape of the building, and taxpayers would still be on the hook for expenses related to the building’s age and poor condition.

One of the big advantages of building on the same site as the current library is that the library system already owns the land, keeping expenses for the project lower. A project combining a recreation center with a library, involving two city departments with their own particular bureaucratic cultures and coordinating with the St. Paul Public Schools, would dramatically increase the complexity and expense of this project, and could potentially push the timeline for an improved library out even further into the future after many decades of delay. It could also mean that the improvements we need might not happen at all if negotiations for a joint-use facility get bogged down in red tape. In any case, there would not be time to create a proposal for a joint-use facility in time for the April 2 deadline for this CIB funding cycle, so a joint-use plan would push the timeline forward another two years at a minimum.

We also have the following concerns about a community library being co-located with an elementary school:

• Some studies have indicated that libraries co-located with elementary schools pose particular challenges for welcoming the community as a whole and can be perceived as less welcoming to single adults or seen as “just for kids.”
• Co-location with a school also increases security issues in order to keep kids safe at a location where many members of the public would be coming and going into the library, without the usual sign-in procedures and monitoring of visitors required at schools.
• We understand from conversation with Hamline Elementary parents that there are already some issues regarding lack of clarity when it comes to whether the school or Parks and Rec is responsible for maintenance issues at the shared rec center, school gym, and playground. This lack of clarity over use and maintenance of a space shared by two city entities has led to some spaces being under-utilized, while some rec center spaces are difficult to access by the general public.

The idea for a shared joint-use facility has come up before, proposed several years ago by former Ward 4 Councilmember Russ Stark as a way to safeguard having a library in our community after years of the city threatening to close our branch. The idea never gained significant traction, in large part because of the types of complexities mentioned above.

Through recent conversations with other community members, we are learning that Hamline Elementary students and families do not have library services in their school, and a possible hope is that a SPPL branch located at the school would address that problem. However, we feel that the plan could significantly compromise the library’s overall usefulness and ability to be welcoming to the larger community, and we would be more excited to advocate for the SPPS to dedicate resources for Hamline Elementary to have the school library and school librarian they need and deserve.

As we have thought about how to hold all the different community wishes and hopes for this library, we tried to articulate a few guiding principles for how we wanted to approach this conversation and what we wanted to convey to neighbors and library and other city officials. We came up with the following:

1. HMLA is committed to having a library which has a vital and dynamic presence in our neighborhood
2. We hope that 2 particular groups, the under-25 yr olds and those underserved/underrepresented in the current structure of the branch, are intentionally engaged in this process of discernment of design (re-design) and function for our branch
3. Care-filled community processes are needed to make room for the messiness this process will bring up for people in the neighborhood. Having this intention throughout this process will support people to work through the emotional aspects any transition will elicit.
4. We support a reconsideration of design of a new build to include more space/capacity (more than one floor or other ways of expanding square footage). Books take space, but gathering rooms take space too… We have heard a strong desire for meeting space and books, which a 1 floor design may not be able to take into consideration…. We support a vision process for spaces that could embody “funky urban living and intentional peacemaking practices,” with spaces to actually practice such work…

We offer up all these thoughts in the spirit of transparency, honesty, and deep vulnerability, knowing that these conversations are incredibly fraught. We wanted to bring our perspective and collective history with the library into the community conversation, because we felt we had information to share that could be helpful as people weigh the options before us. We feel so much hope and excitement about the possibilities for our community in a new library. If that plan ends up being funded and approved, we would look forward to working with you all to push for full, robust community engagement around the library design. We would also work to make sure we have opportunities as a community to process all the difficult emotions that would come up around losing our old library and building a new one, and to find ways to respect and integrate the library’s history into a new design.

Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that the library will receive funding in this CIB cycle, given how many other projects are vying for limited dollars. To help improve the library’s chances, we urge people to fill out the CIB survey and to share their feedback about the library plans with Councilmember Mitra Jalali at ward4@ci.stpaul.mn.us. We also invite you to reach out at hmlibraryassociation@gmail.com if you would like to discuss what we’ve shared here. Whatever happens this cycle, we hope to engage with our community and continue to protect having the most vibrant, welcoming, and accessible library possible for our neighborhood.

Signed,

The Hamline Midway Library Association

Dani Nicholson, Chair

Luna GebbenGreen, Vice Chair

Caryl Mousseaux

Deepa Rathnam Nirmal

Molly Pirjevec

Carrie Pomeroy

Jean Thilmany