Queens Library Highlighted as Anti-Poverty Agency

-- Library Journal, 12/1/2006

In an article headlined "A Social-Uplift Program That Works," City Journal, the magazine of the conservative Manhattan Institute, takes a long look at the Queens Borough Public Library. Writes Nicole Gelinas, "It succeeds by doing what it has done for over a century: giving New Yorkers with ambition (however modest or grand it may be) the tools they need for self-improvement. These tools get real results in Gotham, where people can earn an incremental reward for each skill they obtain. Learn English, and move from a kitchen job to an office job. Master math, and pass the GED and start technical college." However, Gelinas observes that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has recently released an anti-poverty plan, but it said nothing about New York's three public library systems.

Queens typically leads the country in circulation, and is third in per capita circulation nationally. Gelinas visited the bustling, modern Flushing branch—in the heart of Queens' Chinatown—and found that, "[j]ust a half-hour into its day, the Flushing library becomes as crowded as a bus station." Among the programs cited include the library's English-for-Speakers-of-a-Second-Language program, the largest in the country, citizenship classes, and a program where teens meet at a chess club. Also cited: the library's provision of a quiet places to study. Still, Gelinas notes, the library's doors are open only 39 hours a week, little more than half the open hours in the early 20th century, so its impact is necessarily limited.