Day 115, Friday July 12, 2024: Solvay, New York to Johnstown, New York

Carnegie libraries visited: Canastota and Johnstown, New York

Days sober: 386

Solvay Public Library

Solvay Public Library Bathroom

I have only a short 130 mile itinerary today, cutting east through the center of New York, so I’m feeling edgy. It’s easier to fill the days when I’m driving most of the time. I do need to find a new book to listen to. My two most recent checkouts, Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke have left me cold. I chose them from the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century, and you know how much trust I put in experts. They are not beach books and, anyway, I’m not at the beach.

Sullivan Free Library in Chittenago

I called an old friend of mine last night; I have not seen her in about a decade. She used to live in a Kansas City suburb so when I got close I looked her up on Facebook. When I was in touch with her, we each posted frequently. When I looked her up this time, it looked like she had simply stopped posting around 2018. I’ve had a couple of friends disappear like this, which left me thinking: What happened? Why did they stop? Were they ok?

She told me that she stopped because Facebook had changed. What had been a source of joy, as she heard from her friends; saw pictures of their pets, or children, or vacations; or shared their experiences instead turned into what has been called the “enshittification” of the internet: spam, bots, anger. She had not resumed posting; I saw that her friends who were still active had tagged her in their pictures, and she would respond to them. 

It was good to catch up, although she shared one deeply troubling story. Until she stopped posting, she often shared pictures of having fun with her partner. They both looked so happy. Then: he died from Covid, a death that might have been avoided. She is a nurse, and so got vaccinated as early as often as possible. He rejected the vaccine for political reasons. When they both contracted the virus, she got quite sick and he got much worse, living his last few weeks on a ventilator, without the company of his friends and family because he was quarantined in the hospital. How was it possible, she asked me, that this disease had become so politicized that people would put their own lives at risk to make a partisan statement? As a nurse, she faces vaccine skepticism and outright hostility. Her response: “I got vaccinated and I lived. My partner didn’t, and he died.”

Canastota Carnegie Library

We all have our pet peeves. I hate cabinet drawers left open and, even more passionately, venetian blinds that are not left horizontal at the bottom. I have a new one: power lines that mar the view of libraries. What’s with that, town planners? Why didn’t you run the power lines behind the library? Oh, because they would be too difficult to get to if repairs are needed? I guess that makes sense. And why don’t you just bury them? Surely that would beautify the landscape and be cheaper in the long run, right, as they won’t get knocked out during storms. Actually, burying them is vastly more expensive, and it’s no guarantee that they won’t go out of service. Ok, fine, but it still bugs me.

I know I could photoshop the lines out of my pictures, yet I’m reluctant to do so. Part of the reason is that I want to show these libraries as their patrons see them. The other reason is that I don’t know how to edit them out, and don’t want to take the time to learn and do that.

I am trying to learn new skills on this trip. Like becoming a better writer, for instance. When I read now, I pay close attention to how persons, places, and events are described. As an academic writer, I rarely used metaphors or other stylistic tools, although I did try to make my book titles evocative: the Thrift Tragedy, Welfare Magnets, Fatal Extraction. I feel least competent at describing a person’s appearance. How can I not envy Charles Dickens, who described one character like so: “His mouth was such a post-office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling.”

Utica Public Library

Johnstown Carnegie Library

Nothing in the histories of the Carnegie libraries in Canastota and Johnstown need be mentioned here. The most intriguing library I visited today was the Carnegie that was not built. Carnegie had offered $15,000 to Oneida and the town turned the money down. It seems that the townsfolk believed that Carnegie did not offer enough money, while at the same time it was unwilling to tax itself enough to match the amount it requested. 

Oneida did not stand alone; over 200 other towns rejected Carnegie grants. In 1915 Alvin Johnson, in his report to the Carnegie Corporation, described the reasons for rejection:

Occasionally, indeed one encounters doctrinaire individualists who maintain that every person ought to be held to the necessity of providing himself with such reading matter as he may require. There are also to be found Socialists who attack the free library as an institution "cunningly devised to distract the attention of the working class from their woes." City library appropriations are sometimes opposed by demagogues on the ground that they benefit chiefly the leisure class. There are further, religious zealots who maintain that the encouragement of miscellaneous reading is a menace to what they hold to be the true faith. Some authors, publishers and booksellers view the free public library askance, asserting that it restricts the market for books and discourages talent and legitimate enterprise. [Quote from “Introduction,” by Robert Sidney Martin, in Carnegie Denied: Communities Rejection Carnegie Library Construction Grants, edited by Robert Sidney Johnson, Greenwood Press, 1993. The source of the quote is Alvin Johnson, “A Report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York on the Policy of Donations to Free Public Libraries,” November 18, 1915, p. 7]

George S. Bobinski, in his book Carnegie Libraries: Their History and Impact on American Library Development (Chicago: American Library Association, 1969), sought to uncover why these communities in fact turned the grants down. The largest category, fifty-six communities, rejected the grants for reasons undocumented. In twenty-three towns, a local philanthropist stepped in to provide the funds; the same number were not willing to bear Carnegie’s financial stipulations regarding tax support. Sixteen communities were unable to get Bertram to sign off on their grand architectural plans; eleven towns were not prepared to move forward because of high construction costs. Nine reported that they were legally unable to comply with Carnegie’s financial requirements for annual tax support. I’m not sure how it maps on to these data that Bobinski found that forty-seven localities rejected Carnegie’s offer either by a vote of the town council (26) or by a popular vote (21). Not everyone, it seems, supported the concept of “free” public libraries.

Margaret Reaney Public LIbrary