Editorial: The Bronx Is Up

It has been a week since the new library Center in “'da Bronx” opened, and at 5:45 p.m. the place is packed, the din exhilarating. The woman who answers the phone—no phone machine hell here but a live human being—says it has been like this every day since the grand opening LJ attended on January 17. No wonder she sounds so happy. The staff worked round the clock over the holidays to make sure the library was ready. “I had to push them out the door,” Michael Alvarez, Chief Librarian of the new facility, told me on opening day.

This branch off Fordham Road is closest to my heart, though, and to the hearts of a lot of other people, too. Both Susan Kent, chief of the NYPL Branch Libraries, and I grew up in the Bronx. For those who lived near the Grand Concourse, as we did, Fordham Road was the place to go. It is still the third largest retail corridor in New York City, with 25,000 shoppers daily, according to nyc.gov. Now, alongside the tattoo parlor and psychic reader near the new library, the national chains point to signs of commercial redevelopment: PC Richards, Bally Fitness, The Gap, a Nine West outlet, Banco Popular, and Washington Mutual have joined the longstanding mom-and-pop stores.

Besides the part it plays in community redevelopment, there are so many things to love about this library. The gleaming five-floor glass structure sits comfortably amid five- and six-story buildings from the Thirties and Forties. It belongs there. “On a clear day,” yes, you can see forever, from the steeple of Fordham University all the way east to the New York Botanical Garden. Daylight streams in, illuminating every book, audiobook, DVD, CD, newpaper, magazine, toy, and artwork in the place. There is an outdoor reading terrace on the adult fiction and nonfiction floor. The building is NYPL's first “green” or “sustainable” facility, and the first “green” public project in New York City. Twenty percent of the materials used in the building were recycled; 55 percent were manufactured locally or regionally.

This building caters to the past, present, and future. As it has always been, the library is still “a gateway to immigrants,” says Kent. Now they come from Dominican Republic, Mexico, Jamaica, and many other locales. The fourth floor houses a 20,000-book Latino and Puerto Rican Cultural Center, reflecting the current population of the Bronx, some 45 percent of whom are Spanish-speaking, says Lucidia Gratacos Arus, supervising librarian. An Interpretype translator—just a keyboard and small screen—lets Spanish speakers type in questions in their native language that automatically appear on the librarian's PC in English; then it translates the English response back to Spanish. There are 127 computers for public access and 30 laptops for patrons to check out and use within the building. The see-through, 12-sided standalone shelving for genre fiction, urban fiction, classic fiction by African American authors, nonfiction and poetry by Hispanic writers, and much more, works better than anything I've seen in Barnes & Noble. A media wall—three plasma screens—on the ground floor faces out and can be read from across the street.

For Alvarez, who started as a page at NYPL in 1984, the BLC both reflects and embraces the community. “It's glass encased, transparent, so everything that happens inside is visible. People can see me, and I can see them. There's so much written about the views on the upper floors but on the ground floor is where the transparency is really evident.” This glorious, transparent library is a huge leap for the Branch Libraries, and for the Bronx.

fialkoff@reedbusiness.com