Notes on City Library Plan and State Library Historic Listing

The City Library is undertaking a process to write a new strategic plan and the steering committee meets today, Wednesday the 29th.

Existing Conditions Situation Assessment

The "Situation Assessment" on existing conditions is interesting. It continues to be weird how much people focus on a lack of free parking as a barrier. Poor people often don't have cars at all, and much of the complaint about free parking is from people who can afford to pay for parking, but find paid parking annoying and project their complaint onto others more disadvantaged to secure legitimacy for the complaint. 

The Library could always offer parking vouchers or passes to people with Oregon Trail Cards or manage any regressive aspect to paid parking in ways other than free parking for everybody.

Fortunately, people have also focused on other problems: Lack of branch libraries, difficulties with transit, and barriers to walking and biking. There are real spatial problems with our Library. Hopefully the process will give more attention to these and less to parking.

Transportation and location themes

It will be interesting to see how the process grapples with the trend to dematerialize the Library. Ebooks and digital resources are important, but the beating heart of the Library remains the physical place and the physical book. However much the metaverse wants a disembodied existence, we live in our bodies.

Salem: Bad by Oregon standards, ok nationally

In the report was also a table of benchmarks and comparisons with peer libraries. Salem fared very badly in the comparison with peer libraries in Oregon, but was ok in comparison with peer libraries elsewhere in the country. Maybe others will criticize the methodology in compiling "peer" libraries, but I take it at face value for the moment. The comparison looks a lot like those with our bike system: Not very good by Oregon standards, but decent or even good by national standards. Salem scores like this on a lot of metrics, it seems.

Previously:

• "Free Parking at the Library Could Cost about one Staff FTE" (2016)
  
• "MORE PARKING!!! won't Solve Peace Plaza's Deadness" (2019)
  
• All notes on our library
  

While the City Library is likely a non-contributing resource for the Civic Center's Nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, the State Library building of 1939 itself was recently successfully nominated to the Register, a nomination that logically follows from the Capitol's placement on the Register, and also a celebration of New Deal public works.

State Library plan, c.1938

Interestingly, the Nomination references Gabriel Lavare’s carving of the Pioneer Mother Reading to her Son.

Pioneer Mother at State Library (2014)

At the dedication, the Librarian at Mills College, Evelyn Steel Little, called it out and said:

In the hall of this building you have wisely set a memorial plaque to the pioneer mother, not only because her courage braved the material dangers of forest wilderness, where she bore and cared for her children with little help but the work of her own hands, but because she brought with her also from the east a heritage of culture, and this vision she determined to pass on to her children. Not many books could have come in those covered wagons and pack trains that followed after Lewis and Clark. Very often it was only one, but that one the pioneer mother had in her hand and in her heart, and with it she doubtless taught her children to read.

With Guidance of Youth, this is another example of the cult of the Pioneer Mother to keep in mind. It very much encodes a politics.

• See "Guidance of Youth and the Ideology of Pioneer Mother Monuments" (2019)
• And on the Pioneer myth in our public art more generally
  

State Librarian Harriet Long breaking ground
February 23rd, 1938

After mentioning the role of Cornelia Marvin, the Nomination has a suggestion for more research:

Harriet C. Long, state librarian from 1930, was recognized for expanding the rural library service during her tenure. She was influential in fostering interest of local writers in one another and in developing a consciousness of “Northwestern Literature.” She spent twenty-five years looking for funding to construct a separate library building. Long played a pivotal role in the State Library building and advised Whitehouse and Church on the layout of rooms, shelving, and office furnishings of the library. The role played by women in providing library materials to communities throughout the state is an important part of the library’s history but outside the scope of this nomination. Future research may suggest that women’s history is an area of significance to the State Library building.

The prior history of the "Piety Hill" neighborhood, and subsequent demolition and redevelopment does not get as much attention in the Nomination as it should.

Cooke-Patton House just before demolition

They mention it only in passing, buried in a paragraph on constructions schedule:

One of the casualties of the State Library construction and the times was the destruction of the large and elegant Cooke-Patton house adjacent to the construction site that was razed when no buyer could be found to move it.

Piety Hill Neighborhood from old Capitol
Cooke-Patton is the right-most in the inset series

We will have this same problem with the Civic Center Nomination. Because of the bias in our historic preservation framework, we understand a "period of significance" to have surpassing importance, and lose sight of the building and development as a moment in an ongoing history and society. There were things before it, and even with our "preservation" efforts there will be things after it. It is a strange irony that historic preservation usually ostensibly offers a narrative of history, and yet it often ends up an attempt to deny history and to make things changeless.

Approximately Same View Today

We should be more direct about loss and cost in our celebration of historic places. With the State Library building, the loss for Salem is not just the loss of a grand old house we might wish were still around. It is also about the State office monoculture that formed on the edge of downtown, displacing homes and families who supported downtown commerce all the time, not just seasonally, and linking up with the other institutional monoculture of university, hospital, and civic center, all of which weakened rather than strengthened downtown. The Capitol Mall area monoculture is a kind of urban hypoxia zone. (See "Evolution or Erosion? Capitol Shopping Center Rose on Edge of Downtown in late 1940s" for more.)

Additionally, for all the attention the Nomination gives to the New Deal and to "expanded library services," currently the Reading Room is closed and public access very curtailed.

The nominated property exemplifies New Deal construction that provided employment to unemployed persons through its work relief programs and is one of many New Deal projects that provided and expanded services to residents of the state for which funding was not otherwise available.

As currently funded and operated, the building hardly functions in this spirit now. The news overstates this very much, focusing on niche access rather than for "all Oregonians":

Today, the state library is still the only library that serves all Oregonians. Legislators, state employees and historians use it as a historical reference. The state library also provides audiobooks and Braille books for any Oregonians with disabilities that prevent them from reading standard books.

Because the Nomination is essentially focused on the aesthetics of the building, on its "Modernist" and "Stripped Classical" style, and on maintaining the style, it doesn't have to grapple with ambiguity and ambivalence or with very much on-going history and any way the building currently functions in society and culture.

Fortunately, the City Library's planning process appears very much focused on the way the building functions in society and culture, and that will be interesting to follow.