Engines of Optimism

I don’t just want to see library buildings. I want to talk to a variety of librarians, shy and outgoing, and true believers like Magana-Noverola and Doreen Boyd, the Carver’s manager, who spoke of library work as though it were a vocation. Not a utopia—libraries must exist in the real world—but engines of optimism. For the Southeast Branch, the community is Dove Springs, where the population is working-class and two-thirds Hispanic; and the library is what Magana-Noverola calls a browsing library: People come in to see what’s there. Southeast’s programs for both adults and kids are largely bilingual and practical. When I visit, they are hosting a bicycle repair clinic. “Look at the woman holding the air compressor,” Magana-Noverola says, and there she is, hefting it. The volunteer bike mechanic stands back. You can smell the newfound confidence in the room.

The beautiful Hampton Branch in Oak Hill, which backs onto the Violet Crown greenbelt, is one of the smallest libraries but is among the top in circulation and visitor counts. Its community consists of many families who come in for books and other materials, and the branch employs two youth librarians where most branches have only one. All sorts of things affect a library’s community: bus lines, neighborhood, gentrification, square footage, local median income, languages spoken. Menchaca’s community includes a lot of “dinks.” I am shocked to hear a librarian say this, until she clarifies it stands for Dual Income No Kids. Menchaca is one of the branches that palpably feels like it’s in a big city—it’s on several bus routes—but the neighborhood is also gentrifying, which brings in the DINKs.

A library’s community shapes its mission. “We serve who comes through our doors,” says Danny Walker, the manager for the Terrazas Branch downtown. “Eighty percent of the people, at least, who come here are those experiencing homelessness or some type of challenge in their lives.” We speak in Walker’s office in the newly renovated Terrazas: new carpets and paint, new meeting rooms along the back wall, shorter shelves to improve sightlines (a trend in revamped library buildings). It’s gorgeous inside, with plenty of seating and computer terminals and some of the friendliest of all the library staff I meet. That is another resource that public libraries offer: respect for people who deserve respect but don’t always get it.

“Many people come because it’s a safe place,” Walker says. “It’s cool or warm. We’ve got computers to keep them in contact with the outside world.” They help people materially, too: “We’ve got some clothing, we’ll give it out. We’ve got shoes, we’ve got snacks, we’ve got water,” he says. For a while, Terrazas was without a youth librarian, but recently they’ve hired one. Already they’re bringing in 150 kids a week with the new programming.

Terrazas shares two community services navigators, who help people apply for jobs, housing, and other resources, with the Little Walnut Creek Branch in North Austin, near Rundberg Lane. Little Walnut Creek—what a Laura Ingalls Wilder name for a library addressing 21st-century problems!—is another services library, not an official designation but a term to describe what patrons are looking for. They have a Virtual Court Kiosk­—a dedicated computer terminal that, during the week, offers live legal help. They also host the Austin school district’s volunteer tutoring program, “Victory,” along with Carver, Ruiz, and Southeast.

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Since the beginning, the mission of the public library has been to reuse, recycle, recirculate. In the 21st century, libraries are finding new ways to do so. I visit a clothing swap at the Menchaca Road Branch, run by librarians giddy with the sort of joy that accompanies successful programming. Clothing is organized on tables. At the back, blue partitions serve as a fitting room, marked with a sign. (Librarians will tell you that clear signage is an essential part of any library.) A mother comes in with two daughters, and a gregarious librarian welcomes them and then says to the smaller girl, who must have been 7, “You look like you have something to ask me.” The girl, clutching two picture books, carefully asks, “Can you read in here?” “Of course!” the librarian says, finding her a good place to sit.

I love the “you” in the girl’s question. She wasn’t asking about permission but possibility, which is one of the library’s great resources.

The Windsor Park Branch is hosting a plant swap when I visit, with plans for a costume shop in October. Several libraries have jigsaw puzzle swaps. “It just makes you feel good about humanity,” says Hannah Fassett, branch manager at Spicewood Springs. “You come out of the puzzle swap, like, ‘I think people are basically good.’” You can bring your broken toys to a Fix-It Clinic at the Cepeda Branch, or the Toy Hospital at University Hills; you can join a mending circle at Yarborough or Spicewood Springs. You can donate your old books to Recycled Reads, rated by Yelp as the best used bookstore in Austin. The shop also receives books weeded from all the Austin libraries as part of the city’s Zero Waste initiative. It’s an eccentric dream of a bookstore—brilliantly organized but not curated, democratic and oddball.

Most branches have a Seed Collection, where people can pick up packets of seeds and drop off any extras they have. I attend a meeting at the Twin Oaks Branch and funnel bluebonnet seeds into tiny envelopes, surely the most Texan experience of my life. In my travels I see many Seed Collections in a series of disused library furniture: card catalogs, CD displays, and at least one magazine rack.

Sometimes the reuse is particularly moving. When I speak via Zoom to Kelly Overton, the Windsor Park Branch manager, she tells me I might be able to hear the Windsor Park piano, an old upright that some community members found at East Austin’s Creative Reuse store. They decorated it and wheeled it over. Passersby play it, and the library holds singalongs around it. It’s a beautiful, ramshackle thing, “Play Me” in letters above it, and when I visit the Windsor Park Branch I wish I could, and that someone else would. The next day, a Facebook friend posts that she had made a run to the book deposit and came upon a man who looked possibly down on his luck playing the piano. She asked if she could record him and put it online. He agreed, and in this way the piano had another gathering around it. The library building isn’t open 24 hours a day, but its arms—by which I mean its book deposits—are, and so is the Windsor Park piano. Erik Satie! say the Facebook comments.

Thirteen miles away, the interior and exterior of the Southeast Branch are decorated with ceramic tiles made by students at nearby Widén Elementary and Mendez Middle schools. The smiling faces are as bright as the day they were fired in 1995. People in their 30s come to find their childhood handiwork. Some move back to their neighborhoods and visit the branches they went to as kids. At Windsor Park some years back, there was tension between a few teen and adult patrons that the library had to mediate. Now, one of the then-teenagers has returned with her own children. “Man, I really put you guys through it,” she tells Overton. The library forgives. These days that even includes lateness: In 2022, the Austin Public Library system abolished overdue fines.

At every library I walk into, if I come anywhere near the front desk, I am greeted and asked if I need help. If I head toward the back to look around, I am left alone because library employees can read people as fluently as bartenders. Some people long to be visible, and others fear it. Only once do I encounter anything less than Texan friendliness. A woman raises her head and says, “Yes?” to me, unsmiling as a New Englander. I, a New Englander, am warmed to my soul. I could have hugged her. She would have hated it.

I don’t mean that all librarians are outgoing. There are cranks and shy people at libraries, and extroverts, and the youth librarians, who everyone agrees are superheroes.

I have to gather myself before I approach the staff at the front desk. Running a circulation desk myself is what cracked my until-then lifelong paralyzing shyness—a public librarian must talk to the public—but I still don’t like strangers. Ordinarily, there’s no way I can approach more than a dozen in a day. But no public library worker is truly a stranger to me. “Home,” wrote Robert Frost, “is the place where, when you have to go there / They have to take you in.” Public libraries are home. Not just for me: for everyone, even if they don’t know it.

It isn’t a fool’s errand to travel to 20 libraries in two days. I love every minute. I leave every library alive and engaged. Writing this article is another story. I could write a library about the libraries: The Carver Branch hosts vinyl brunches—they hire a DJ to spin records from the collection and serve mocktails. They also co-sponsor the African American Book Festival, which last year featured the legendary Nikki Giovanni. At the Cepeda Branch, Dawn to Dusk­—a series of 14 nature murals by Rene Garcia Anguiano—curve beautifully above each rectangular institutional window. At the Hampton Branch you can take a memoir class from Austin icon Spike Gillespie. At the Howson you can, among other things, read to therapy dogs. Little Walnut Creek has a collection of flags at its front, rumored to have been donated by the communities of immigrants from their respective countries. The Milwood Branch is the farthest north library, and though I drive there I’m not sure I could find it again. It seems to appear, alongside its small sculpture park, like a fairytale. The newly renamed John Gillum Branch, formerly North Village, has curved walls and green features and a drive-thru, which they used through the pandemic. “Most [branches] did it like at H-E-B or Target or Chili’s, where you pull into a spot and you call in, ‘I’m at space No. 3, please bring out my stuff,’” branch manager Michael Abramov says. “We just did it like Whataburger.” Patrons drove right up to get their book orders.

The Old Quarry Branch is closed for renovations, though of course I visit it. I would hate my library dash to be called into question on a technicality. Pleasant Hill is a diamond-shaped building. Above the bins where returned books are sorted somebody has stuck a sign that says, in gothic lettering, “The Rack,” which makes me laugh out loud. It’s such a public library joke. Recycled Reads has the most visionary circulating collection in the network, the tool library. There, patrons can check out garden implements, power tools, saws and hammers, ladders, tile nippers, and wire strippers. Behind its front desk Ruiz has a series of life-size crocheted birds—compact owl, vast swan—made by one of the library employees. It also has an actual crow that has been known to visit and tap at the windows. At the Southeast Branch, they partnered with nonprofit Compudopt to distribute 177 laptops to under-resourced kids and their families. The St. John’s Branch, on Blessing Avenue, is named after a historic orphanage for Black children and is the only branch that isn’t a standalone. It shares a building with Pickle Elementary, a rec center, and a clinic. It feels like a hangar, in a good way, with high ceilings and exposed ductwork as though things inside can take flight. University Hills has a brightly painted bench that says “Human Salvation Lies in the Hands of the Creatively Maladjusted.”

When I ask someone who works there about the library’s best features, they talk about the neighborhood, the patrons, the little garden out front, and the topographical map of Texas. The latter attracts kids, and I think of how the map also must loom large in plenty of adults’ memories. Terrazas had a goodbye to summer party four days before I visit, with marching bands, face painting, and arts and crafts. Twin Oaks has a huge hanging sculpture made of old typewriter parts—Black Well by Stephanie Strange. The Willie Mae Kirk Branch, like Old Quarry, is closed, but every time a public library is renovated an angel gets its wings right here on earth. Windsor Park holds a competitive haiku contest. Yarborough, the closest branch to the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, has a collection in Braille.

Books, music, databases, bound volumes of newspapers, skilled reference librarians: yes, the public library has these. But it also has more intangible resources, most especially that it allows people to exist in its context. You can sit with other people in a room, sorting seeds or reading silently. If you are a baby, you can go to baby social hour; if you are a kid, to Lego Club or a story time in any number of languages; if you are a grown-up, to Adult Lego Night. You can make a Vision Board, join a mending circle or book club, or see a movie.

The public library is the most democratic of public services. Nobody will ask you what you’re doing there. By being there, you belong.