Guest Opinion | Rick Cole: Library Closing is a Moment of Reckoning

For nearly one hundred years, Pasadena’s Central Library has been a vital community resource, full of residents, students and researchers utilizing its unique resources. It has served as an iconic public space, inside and out – a vibrant crossroads of people from all walks of life who gathered for study, lectures, events and meetings.

Now it is closed – indefinitely. After belatedly discovering the landmark structure fails modern seismic standards, the City has shuttered the building — and is scrambling to ascertain the cost of retrofitting and how to pay for it.

It’s a shock. This stunning loss that comes on top of a year of pandemic closures of all Pasadena’s public libraries. Our city is virtually unique in California – we are the beneficiaries of the vision of the founding generations. They insisted that no child be more than a mile from a branch library and financed a huge central library in the Civic Center. Pasadena residents were once nationally known as the “best read” in America, an oasis of dedication to the power of the written word.

This crisis is also a moment of reckoning. In a time of bewildering technological and social change, can we build back better – or will we spend tens of millions seeking to restore a nostalgic vision of libraries that looks to the past instead of the future?

When I was growing up, it would have been rare for a family to have never used the Central Library – as well as their neighborhood branch. But now?

We are raising a generation for whom a library is no longer a necessity. One of the telling ironies of the past year revealed many empty libraries across America still had full parking lots – because of their free wifi beyond the walls. Even before the pandemic, online visits to library websites exceeded in person visits. If you no longer need to enter a library to do your homework, seek a job, find public documents or even borrow a book – how do libraries avoid the fate of livery stables, video rental stores or typewriter repair shops?

Some argue there will always be a place for physical books. Maybe – although those people seem to be a graying demographic. I know – I’m one of them. My children are all readers, but they do not share my fervent enthusiasm for libraries, bookstores and bookshelves. It is hard to begrudge them their preferences. Their constant access to screens puts them in instant reach of far more information than all the books I had access to at the San Rafael Branch Library. As a child at home, I could use a partial encyclopedia set that mysteriously ended at TECH-. My college age offspring have Wikipedia in their pockets.

So before we decide to spend forty to eighty million dollars to “restore” the magnificent Pasadena Library, we ought to ask: for what end?

That decision belongs to the community. Traditionalists, whether they are lovers of libraries or historic architecture (or both) will insist that we have no choice – we can’t abandon this extraordinary resource. I would agree with them – but only with the informed support of the broader community, including those among our 140,000 people who’ve never set foot in the Central Library.

Much as some continue to take them for granted, libraries are not an end in themselves. They were created to fulfill a great public purpose. America once embraced a shining vision that every child, every worker, every immigrant, every family, would have free access to the wealth of human knowledge for their education, their social wellbeing, their economic advancement and their enjoyment.

Books just happened to be the main tool. The first library in America was organized by Ben Franklin, whose parents could only afford to send him to two years of formal schooling. Open to those who paid modest dues, Franklin’s association not only lent out books, it also hosted discussion groups and provided access to medical and scientific instruments to further self-education.

That vision of “a school open to all” for lifelong learning has enduring resonance. Learning takes myriad forms – and a 21st Century library should take advantage of them all. Today’s pop culture offers unlimited options for entertainment, but few for enlightenment. What if we reconceived our libraries not primarily as quiet places to access books, but vibrant places to experience learning in all its forms?

It’s not exactly a new idea. Forward-thinking library professionals have embraced innovative ways to engage their communities with non-traditional activities from gardening classes to “maker spaces” where inventors and hobbyists can experiment with 3D printers. But in the public imagination, these offerings are tangential to their image of libraries as lined with bookshelves. For young adults, libraries are places to take their kids for story time. They are not places that compete with sports venues, coffee bars or nightclubs as places to spend their evenings and weekends.

That’s a missed opportunity. Every day, the news reports on a mounting crisis of democracy, as polarized agendas, civic ignorance and gross economic inequities undermine the common good. The more we live in our individualized bubbles, the less we experience a shared sense of community. Libraries could rekindle that common purpose – reimagining how we utilize the space Myron Hunt designed for the books of Western Civilization to attract all ages and backgrounds in our increasingly diverse city.

Pasadena’s Central Library should be reborn – not as a tribute to the past, but as a doorway to the future. It can be so much more than a warehouse for books. It should be a destination for democratic learning and community life. Now is the time to convene educators, parents, civic leaders, activists, entrepreneurs, librarians and community residents to plan a revitalized space within those halls hallowed by history. Let’s create a library as bridge to the next century, not a memorial to the last one.

Rick Cole is a former Mayor of Pasadena.