Kids and libraries
The Elmhurst branch of the Queens Library, New York
Books have always meant a lot to me. They’ve been companions, teachers and entertainers. My grandfather’s stash of books was the first place I remember being wowed by print and pictures before I could read. I couldn’t help but beg to be taught to read when I was four.
There is no Frigate like a book/To take us Lands away, wrote Emily Dickinson. Books can take us places within our imagination that will never be visited if we’re watching a movie, playing a video game or mindlessly tuning into network TV. The synapses that fire in our brains when we’re deep in a book are dormant when we’re passively watching a sitcom.
I’ve been a reader since I was four and one of the places that seemed like paradise to me when I was young was the Queens Library’s Elmhurst branch in New York. The fairy tales and saints’ biographies I read were checked out of this little neighborhood library that had been built in 1906 with Andrew Carnegie’s millions.
To a kid who loved books, but whose family didn’t have much money, the public library was a feast and a Godsend. After parochial school ended, my sister and I could go browse shelves and come home with an armload of books that didn’t cost us a cent. (Our cents were spent at the candy store near the school. We ate candy while we read, which our teeth will attest to now. By the way, my sister is still a reader, too.)
The Elmhurst branch library was within walking distance and it stocked what seemed to me to be all the knowledge in the world. I read everything: novels by Jerzy Kosinski that were way above my grade level, true-crime stories about the FBI, biographies and, yes, fairy tales. The more I read, the more I realized how much more there was to read.
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Elmhurst branch library, even though I haven’t visited in decades. In researching the location on the Internet, I was dismayed to learn that the Queens Library is facing budget cuts that threaten its availability to serve kids as hungry for knowledge as I was:
Queens Library has sustained $5.6 million in cuts and is facing $11.8 million more in reductions this year. If these additional cuts take effect, they will devastate our neighborhood libraries. We’ll lose six-day service, which we fought so hard to restore, with every community library closed all weekend long, and some left with less than five days of service. All of our programs and services, including after-school and ESOL programs, will be reduced. And we’ll have fewer books, DVDs and other library materials available. We can’t let this happen! Our voices must be heard. Please join us in advocating for Queens Library today!
Think about it: the one place in the neighborhood where kids can feel safe after school, where they can learn and get lost in literature and where they are surrounded by learning is going to limit its services. Instead of spending time at the library on Saturday, kids will be left with few options for learning opportunities. My library didn’t have DVDs or videos or a coffee shop: It had books.
The Queens Library has a Web site where they are asking New Yorkers to contact their legislators. It’s shameful that a place with such a long history of educating the community and such a vital service that plants the seeds for future learning has to beg to keep its doors open.
Libraries in many communities are facing the same budget shortfall, but this one touched me because it was the one place that meant so much to me. I arrived in Queens as a nine-year-old who spoke only Spanish and, when we moved out of Queens when I was 13, I was fully fluent in both English and Spanish. I learned the language by reading endlessly at the Queens Library’s Elmhurst branch.
The prospect of having children like me in the ethnically diverse neighborhood of Elmhurst not have this library as a resource would be a tragedy.
