Talking Point

City needs to stand and deliver on new teen library

By Kathy Casey 

Probably almost everyone who is reading this has been a teenager at some point. A collective image is evoked for each of us by the word “teenagers.” It varies with our age, and with the nature and frequency of our daily encounters with teenagers in groups. For many of us, the concept of “teenagers” is unappealing—to put it mildly.

Undaunted, I hope to persuade many of my fellow former teenagers to show solidarity with the current and incipient ones by demanding that the New York Public Library replace the Teen Central library resource now being dismantled at the Donnell Library Center. This is essential during the six or more school years before a new circulating library will be added, within the century-old Research Library adjacent to Bryant Park, “by 2014 or so.” The new Teen Central should be fully operating when school opens in September.

Teenagers who live and/or attend school in the “catchment area” of the Donnell Library Center are very numerous, and not a monotonous group. Public high schools alone include more than 30, with tens of thousands of students. Many of these are within Community Board 4 neighborhoods.

The entire area from 23rd St. (east to west) to W. 100th St. and E. 96th St. has 11 branch libraries. Most are small, and 10 are on the borders of that huge expanse. Each has, at most, a couple of skimpy tables set aside for teenagers a few hours a week—and only one or two reserved computers.

These teenagers include 13- and 14-year-olds in middle school in Chelsea and elsewhere, along with young people who have been in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are geeks and grinds whose chief ambition is to be a National Merit Scholar finalist, and dropout young parents who don’t intend to ever take the GED.

New immigrants from dozens of countries, such as those at Liberty High School in Chelsea, sit alongside sixth-generation African-American New Yorkers whose school libraries and local public libraries contain very little of what they need. The young immigrants, along with students learning a second language, also will be hurt by the loss of the World Languages Collection at Donnell.

Many young people seek part-time or full-time jobs, while others just want to do their homework passably. Sexually active teenagers may hunt facts on birth control, HIV/AIDS and STDs. Young artists, writers, actors, singers, dancers and athletes seek scholarships; others search for financial aid for college.

I was not a teenage werewolf, but I will admit to something possibly weirder: I was a Young Adult Librarian—in Manhattan and Bronx NYPL libraries, among other places. I was not one of the best Y.A. librarians, but I did try, among other things, to share my enthusiasm for books such as “The Contender,” “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich,” “The Moves Make the Man,” “Make Lemonade,” “Fast Talk on a Slow Track” and “The Ruby in the Smoke.”

The librarian in charge at Teen Central has worked with tens of thousands of NYC teenagers over three decades. These teenagers use the library designed for them to learn about other people’s lives and ideas in various times, places and circumstances—and to imagine a future for themselves.

NYPL brass, along with Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Quinn, kept secret for two years their plan to close the Donnell (2008) and Mid-Manhattan (2009) libraries. They have not shown any intention of permanently replacing Teen Central. Neither has the City Council’s Committee on Libraries taken the initiative to restore the services provided for decades at Manhattan’s only two central libraries in the Branch Libraries system.

Board 4, with the leadership of Millie Glaberman—a former teacher and longtime advocate for our public libraries—will consider the matter at a May 12 committee meeting and the next full board meeting. Board 5, where the Donnell Library is located and which has NYPL’s government-liaison person as a member, has yet to act.

The Manhattan delegates to the City Council, with the borough president, can avert this imminent and totally unnecessary disaster. Ask them to act now: before the city budget is fixed, the school year ends, and more than 50 years of central-library services for teenagers in Manhattan end.

Don’t let our young people be robbed of the Teen Central library resource that we taxpayers funded to provide new technology as the 21st century began. We must have services at a new site by September, funded by NYPL with aid from City Council allocations—perhaps in Midtown space donated by some former teenager who now is a wealthy developer.