DC’s Martin Luther King Library Designated Historic Landmark

Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 7/12/2007

The District of Columbia’s Historic Preservation Review Board on June 28—just after the conclusion of the American Library Association Annual Conference—voted to designate the city’s flagship Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) Memorial Library building a historic landmark. The decision marks another sign that the administration of new Mayor Adrian Fenty will take a somewhat different tack  from  former Mayor Anthony Williams regarding the District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL). The library’s board and administration have been cool to the idea of remaining in the MLK library, and last year, Williams’s  plan to build a new central library and lease the current building failed by one vote. But Fenty has tabled such plans, preferring to concentrate, as LJ reported, on branch library renovations. According to the Washington City Paper, that means the library building can’t be demolished, which some feared was in the cards, and the preservation board will have oversight over changes to the first floor or the exterior.

The modernist building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, opened in 1972 and has deteriorated significantly as the city and library skimped on maintenance and investment. Former library board member Alex Padro, a critic of the current library board, lobbied for the designation and cited it on the Recent Past Preservation Network, noting that it’s "the only monument to King in the nation’s capital for the past 30 years." DCPL will continue with ongoing renovations of MLK, though it hasn’t committed to the major revamp necessary to transform the building into a 21st-century central library. Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper offered a noncommittal comment to the City Paper, saying, "We don’t know at this point that [MLK] will not always be the library. We also don’t know at this point that [it] will always be the library."