Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Bronx Library Center stands out from the bustling shopping district around it.
“This building represents the renewal of the Bronx,” one of the architects of the project, Daniel Heuberger, said Tuesday, the library’s opening day.
Appropriately, the building’s glass walls frame an eclectic assortment of shop signs for tattoos, electronics, and ladies clothing.
“Transparency is one of the fundamental concepts of the building,” Mr. Heuberger said. “Fifteen years ago, an open building would not have been possible. This is a sign of faith in the neighborhood,” he said.
Since construction on the library began five years ago, the Fordham Road shopping district has seen a lot of change. A new Business Improvement District is keeping the streets clean with a $500,000 annual budget. Rents are going up. Some stores, such as Pretty Girl and Fortune Leather, are going out of business. Meanwhile, the Gap and national banks have arrived.
“It’s starting to look like 14th Street and 34th Street,” the owner of Fortune Leather, who did not want to give his name, said.
The fate of the neighborhood ultimately may depend on the children who are growing up in it. On opening day, they tested the chairs and thumbed through books on the third floor, where everything is built to a child’s scale.
Later, at the formal ceremony, they showed their literary mettle in a poetry slam.
It almost didn’t happen. At the moment the fifth-grade poets from P.S. 246 were supposed to walk onstage – after the third-graders had sung two songs – the chairwoman of the library, Catherine Marron, introduced Mayor Bloomberg, thinking the children’s interlude was complete.
That left the fifth-graders in a mild panic. Library trustee Gordon Davis saw the worry in their faces and did something about it. He passed a note to the mayor, who promptly read it aloud.
“This says, ‘Poets from fifth grade must go on. Tears.’ All right then,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Come on up.”
And so they did, reciting from memory poems they wrote about identity, homeless people, and what the erasers and pencils do at school when no one is looking. As Jarel Deven Williams said, “So when something at your desk is not quite right, it may be because of what happened last night.”
The mayor stayed at the podium, listening attentively, and only spoke once he was sure the poets were finished.
“If this is any indication, we really do have a great future here in New York City,” he said.
Among the 300 guests at the ceremony were library trustee Roger Hertog and his wife, Susan, who were lead donors (Mr. Hertog is the chairman of The New York Sun); architects Richard Dattner and Mr. Heuberger and their families (who use the Fort Washington and Inwood branches of the New York Public Library), and library trustees Robert Liberman, Joan Hardy Clark, Susan Newhouse, Elizabeth Rohatyn, and Samuel Butler. Mr. Liberman worked closely on the project as the chairman of the library’s real estate and capital projects committee.
