by Susan Orlean
I have never been in a building as forlorn as this old library, with its bruised beauty, its loneliness. Abandoned buildings have a quaking, aching emptiness deeper than the emptiness of a building that has never been filled up. This building was full of what it was missing. It was as if the people who passed through had left a small indent in the air: Their absence was present, it lingered. The kid who learned to read here; the student who wrote a term paper here; the bookworm who wandered happily through these shelves: all gone, gone, gone. A few books were still on the shelves—books that had mysteriously been overlooked when the place was cleared out, like survivors of a neutron bomb. They made the ones that were missing have a slippery, hinted-at presence, as if I were seeing ghosts.
We looked for a light to turn on, but most of the switches clacked futilely. It was a sunny day outside, but in the library, it was dusk. The windows were so dirty that only streaky light poured in. The mournfulness felt like a hand pressing on my chest. I have seen plenty of vacant buildings, but this felt more than vacant. This building made the permanence of libraries feel forsaken. This was a shrine to being forgotten; to memories sprinkled like salt; ideas vaporized as if they never had been formed; stories evaporated as if they had no substance and no weight keeping them bound to the earth and to each of us, and most of all, to the yet-unfolded future.
We roamed around the reading room for a while, shouldering the gloom, and then I mentioned to Szabo that the library might make a very nice house, especially for someone who liked reading. He said it was an interesting idea but that the city was considering something more along the lines of a community center. This thinking has been going on since 1990 and has yet to congeal into a plan. “Such a cool building,” Szabo said, shaking his head. Sarao nodded and said, “It would be great to get it back into use.” We peered out the windows and paced around the main room, opening a few cabinets and doors. I sensed that some small, fierce animals might view the empty library as a pleasant place to nest, which meant that each time I opened a cabinet or door, I suffered from an unpleasant dose of suspense.
Szabo had come to Washington Irving to check on its condition and try to appease neighbors who were dismayed by its dilapidation. Once, the street had been elevated by the library’s handsomeness. Now it was the ugliest neighbor on the block and getting uglier all the time. There was no money to do anything significant, so Szabo was seeing what he could afford to do for the neighbors’ sake. As he was discussing this with Sarao, it occurred to me that a large part of a city librarian’s job is to be a property manager. Szabo is responsible for seventy-three large structures that are spread across the 503 square miles of the city of Los Angeles. To even visit each one of the branches is a major proposition. Szabo’s days seesaw between big thoughts on the future of global information systems and minutiae such as requisitioning a city gardener to trim the weeds around the Washington Irving library. “We should sweep up in here,” he said to Sarao, pushing some rubbish around with his foot. “But let’s focus outside and clean up for the neighbors.” He sighed. “We should definitely clear everything growing around the fence. It will look a lot better.”
Back in Szabo’s car, we drove to City Hall, where he had a meeting scheduled with the city’s homelessness policy director, Alisa Orduña. Fifty years ago, it would have been very unlikely that the city librarian would have had a meeting with a homelessness policy director. In fact, fifty years ago, the city wouldn’t have had a homelessness policy director. Now it is an essential post. In the late 1960s, the media brought attention to the terrible conditions in psychiatric hospitals. Along with the development of antipsychotic drugs and President Reagan’s rollback on mental health funding, state psychiatric hospitals subsequently discharged a large number of patients. Many of these patients didn’t have a home to return to or were too disabled to manage a home on their own. Over the next few decades, money for social service programs and low-income housing withered. Then the Great Recession and the thunderclap of foreclosures around the country contributed mightily to the growing population of people living on the streets or in shelters. By 2009, more than 1.5 million people in the United States met the federal definition of homeless—anyone without a “fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” Los Angeles has more homeless people than almost any other city except New York: At last count, in 2017, there were almost sixty thousand homeless people in Los Angeles.
One of the few places homeless people are welcomed, given access to computers and the Internet, and permitted to dally all day (unless they act out) is a public library. Libraries have become a de facto community center for the homeless across the globe. There is not a library in the world that hasn’t grappled with the issue of how—and how much—to provide for the homeless. Many librarians have told me that they consider this the defining question facing libraries right now, and that they despair of finding a balance between welcoming homeless people and somehow accommodating other patrons who occasionally are scared of them or find them smelly or messy or alienating. Central Library is an amble away from several large shelters and highway overpasses lined with homeless encampments. In the morning, before the library opens, many of the people waiting to enter the building are carrying their worldly goods on their backs. Szabo acknowledges the fact that the library has attained a sort of guardianship of many of Los Angeles’s street people. When he ran the library system in Atlanta, he sent bookmobiles to the motels where many homeless people lived, to offer books and story hours for the children. He included a public health nurse on the bookmobile so the nurse could check on residents’ well-being once the bookmobile had drawn them out.
Alisa Orduña met us in the cool, shiny lobby of City Hall and led us upstairs to her office. She is a broad-shouldered, forthright woman with a luminous smile and a spill of freckles across her nose. Despite dealing all day long with the intractable issue of disenfranchised and mentally ill people, she seems jolly and energetic, nearly buoyant. She and Szabo are in regular contact. Today’s meeting was occasioned by a new city ordinance limiting the size of items allowed on city sidewalks, which was a roundabout way of discouraging people from setting up camps with tents and shopping carts and suitcases. No one was quite sure how the results would ripple through the city when the law went into effect, but it would certainly have an impact on the library. “So, it’s a go for tomorrow,” Orduña said to Szabo about the ordinance. “My guess is that it will create tension.”
Szabo tapped his chin for a moment and then said, “We do have policies on the size of backpacks people can bring into the library. Do we need to be more lenient, to help ease that? In case people come in carrying a lot of their stuff from the camps?” They talked about whether there was a way the library could provide a checkroom with storage space for large items, since people would now be required to clean up their campsites during the day and probably would have nowhere to stash their belongings.
“That would be great. Plus, it would be a chance to do some intake,” Orduña said. “We would love that data.”
“I’d love the data, too,” Szabo said. They talked for a while about whether there was space somewhere in the library that was sitting idle. Szabo tried to be enthusiastic but warned Orduña that the building was already too full. Then Szabo said he’d requested funds in his next budget for the homeless outreach program, The Source, that he had mentioned earlier in the day. Orduña perked up and asked whether the library could accommodate social workers to meet with homeless clients. Szabo winced and said he didn’t think so but took notes so he could research the question further. Orduña sighed and said, “John, you know how it is. What we’re doing is to try to sustain hope while folks are waiting for housing. Just having hope is important.”
Szabo said that he could have bookmobiles dispatched to areas where homeless families were living, as he had done in Atlanta, if they could figure out how to get supplies and funding for bookmobiles without having to go through the ordinary municipal channels. “I’ve
heard nightmares,” Szabo said as Orduña nodded. “Two years to get anything, even a vacuum cleaner, that kind of thing.”
“My God!” Orduña gasped. “For a vacuum cleaner?”
Szabo’s next appointment was across town in Little Tokyo. The neighborhood has its own branch library, a low, long concrete building that opened in 2005. The front of the building is utilitarian; the back is connected to Redbird, one of the fanciest restaurants in downtown Los Angeles. The head of the branch had asked Szabo to stop by so they could discuss a parking agreement with the neighboring building and the plans for the unused land between the back of the library and Redbird. Little Tokyo Branch Library is only a stone’s throw from Central, but it feels entirely different. It is definitely a neighborhood library—compact, specific, homey. Its collections reflect the neighborhood. Central Library has a good-size manga section, but Little Tokyo has a huge manga section. Families in the neighborhood have lots of little kids, so the branch has a large children’s section, with books in English as well as Japanese.
Just inside the front door, a wiry man with gray grizzle dotting his cheeks and chin sat at a plastic card table. He explained to us that he was a volunteer doing outreach for AmeriCorps veterans’ programs. His card table had dozens of pamphlets fanned out like rosettes, and he handed us several.
“Busy day?” Szabo asked him.
The man shook his head and said, “Nah, not much business.” He adjusted one of the rosettes of pamphlets and grinned. “I guess everyone’s outside working on their tans.”
Szabo went off to find the branch’s head librarian, so I wandered alone through the reading room. It was purring with that soothing library noise—not a din, not a racket, just a constant, warm, shapeless sound—space inhabited peacefully and purposefully by many strangers. I walked through the grove of bookshelves toward the children’s section. Two old men and an elderly woman were browsing there, pulling books off the shelves and then conferring in Japanese about each one. They might have been grandparents choosing books for their grandchildren, but the librarian on duty told me they were getting the books for themselves. She said that many people in the neighborhood used picture books to practice their English.
Szabo emerged after a few minutes. He seemed excited and said that it looked like the parking issue was resolved; the library had agreed to let the owners of the Redbird building develop the empty lot. The plan included raised garden beds, a fountain, olive trees, and a tank for raising trout. In the meantime, the branch manager had successfully requested that the Little Tokyo library get power-washed.
It was closing in on five P.M., but Szabo had one more meeting back in his office, with a young woman named Kren Malone, who would soon be taking over as the director of Central Library services. The current director, Eva Mitnick, was becoming the director of engagement and learning, a wide-ranging position Szabo had created, which would include overseeing the bilingual and multilingual librarians, services for new Americans, and all library programs for veterans.
The director of Central is a job distinct from Szabo’s. Szabo runs the entire citywide library system and has his office in Central Library, along with the rest of the library administration. The director of Central runs the main library itself, and reports to Szabo, just as the head of the Little Tokyo branch runs that particular branch and reports to Szabo. The difference is the size and the complexity of Central Library’s collections—rare books, research materials, special collections, along with the usual library books.
Malone, a tall, unruffled African American woman with long curvy hair and a shy smile, had worked at the library for the last seventeen years. When we arrived, she was waiting in Szabo’s office, reading a spreadsheet of book orders. Szabo greeted her and began by telling her about the bike-share kiosk that was going to be installed. They chatted about it while Szabo took off his jacket, straightened his tie, and sat down. The conversation then glided from Central Library to Boyle Heights, a neighborhood east of downtown. A battery recycling plant in the neighborhood had contaminated soil with toxic levels of lead, necessitating the largest lead cleanup in California history. Exide Technologies, which operated the plant, had just agreed to fund blood tests for the twenty-one thousand households in the neighborhood. The tests would be conducted at the Boyle Heights Branch Library. In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries. They become town squares and community centers—even blood-draw locations. In Los Angeles, there have been plenty of disasters requiring libraries to fill that role. In 2016, for instance, a gas storage facility in the Porter Ranch neighborhood sprang a leak, and methane whooshed out, giving residents headaches, nosebleeds, stomachaches, and breathing problems. Eventually, the entire area had to be evacuated. With the help of industrial-strength air purifiers, the library managed to stay open. It became a clearinghouse for information about the crisis, as well as a place where residents could gather while exiled from home. The head of the branch noticed how anxious patrons seemed, so she set up yoga and meditation classes to help people relieve stress. Staff librarians learned how to fill out the expense forms from Southern California Gas so they could assist people applying to get reimbursed for housing and medical costs. American Libraries Magazine applauded the library’s response, noting, “Amid a devastating gas leak, Porter Ranch library remains a constant.”
Szabo and Malone traded updates on various projects. The new library cards, designed by artist Shepard Fairey, would be done soon. Circulation numbers were good. Additional security cameras for the building had been ordered and would arrive in a week or two. Malone took notes and nodded along with each sentence. She asked Szabo when he would be back from the trip he’d be starting at dawn the next day. “A week,” he said, and then smiled and added, “you won’t have time to miss me!”
Just as Malone prepared to leave, Szabo mentioned that he would be back in time for an upcoming celebration at the library. In 2014, Szabo had established Career Online High School—COHS—which is the first accredited library-based high school program in the United States. Through the library’s website, adults who had not gotten their high school diploma could take any of the nine hundred COHS online classes for free, and graduate with a diploma rather than a high school equivalency certificate. Szabo frequently preaches the gospel of the library as the people’s university, and with COHS, he had managed to make good on that notion. It was an idea so obvious and so well suited to a library setting that right after Szabo launched it, fifty other libraries around the country, inspired by the Los Angeles program, began their own adult high school courses. Launching COHS had been one of the most satisfying aspects of his time in Los Angeles, Szabo said. Just a few weeks after he returned from his trips to Toronto and Ohio, he would be officiating at the first graduation ceremony of COHS, where twenty-two adults would receive their high school diplomas, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.
7.
Fire Captain Don Sturkey inspects the damage
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As soon as the news of the fire at Central Library spread, condolence notes arrived from libraries in Belgium, Japan, England, Germany, from all around the world. The director of France’s Bibliothèque nationale wrote, “When the time comes and if you consider it possible, [we would like to] receive all information . . . about the causes of this sinister occurrence.” Notes also came from libraries across the United States—from New York, San Diego, Detroit, Kansas City, the Library of Congress, f
rom universities and colleges. “The staff at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology has been deeply distressed by the news of your recent tragedy.” “We at the Los Angeles County Medical Center share your shock and distress over the tragic fire.” “We at the Oklahoma City Library are so sorry to hear of your library’s calamity. Keep your socks up!” The sentiments expressed most often in these notes were grief, shock, distress, and devastation.
The Central Library staff came to work, but they weren’t sure what “work” meant in a library that was now closed to the public and empty of books. Some of the staff was dispatched to the warehouse in East Los Angeles where many of the undamaged books were being stored. Others were sent into the burned building, where they swept the floors and tried to organize anything left behind. The mood was bleak. The fire felt like a personal violation. Glen Creason felt a “crippling blackness” after the fire. He told me it was the worst day of his life; the second worst was the day his father died. Sylva Monooghian became so depressed that she wore only white clothes for the next several months, hoping that would help her feel pure again. A staff member posted an anonymous note saying, “We should have held prayer sessions . . to prevent the firebug from striking. [Now] there’s the taste of death . . . and the soulless, empty fear and despair overwhelms you.” According to the note, most of the staff had developed “the library cough” and “the library shuffle, a sort of no-destination movement of the feet, forward-back-forward.”