Day 32, Saturday, March 16: Santa Cruz, California to Berkeley, California

Carnegie libraries visited: San Jose East, Alameda, Oakland Melrose, Oakland Temescal, Oakland Golden Gate

The Alameda Carnegie library sits vacant and abandoned. A new library was built just up the street in 2006, and the community has not yet figured out what to do with the Carnegie. Doing anything will cost more than the community seems willing to spend. Many ideas for its continued use have been proposed; none have been accepted. 

Abandoned Alameda Carnegie Library

The “new” library up the street was holding a big book sale the day I visited, and I followed the steady stream of people going towards it. At the cafe outside the door, I ordered a coffee and introduced myself to the volunteer baristas. It was staffed by the Friends of the Library, and Mary Ann and Paula told me that almost all of the volunteering Friends are women. Mary Ann excitedly told me “and Jane Chisaki is inside shopping!”

Jane Chisaki began working for the (Alameda California)  library in January 1984 and had recently retired, thirty nine years later. Jane was responsible for launching the library’s first website, reviving the library’s defunct Alameda Poet Laureate program, establishing the library’s free hotspot program, and administering Tonarigumi, Alameda’s Lost Japantown program. Alameda once had a thriving Japantown in the early 1900s until the anti-immigration laws of the 1920s, increased animosity towards the Japanese in the 1930s, and the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII led to its collapse. The Tonarigumi program consisted of installing historical markers to honor the history of this place.

Alameda Librarians

Mary Ann introduced me to Jane as she was leaving the sale, her tote bag full of books. She cut quite the pose in her purple vest, purple leather handbag, purple thermal cup emblazoned with dog portraits, and purple trainers. Jane has a round face and long straight salt and pepper hair. She was also quite the character. As I learned, she and her staff enjoyed riding up and down on the dumbwaiter in the old building, just for fun. The Irish setter she routinely brought to work helped keep staff meetings lively.

Chisaki is a survivor of the local bureaucracy. She has always been an “at will” employee, which means that her boss (the city manager) could fire her at any moment. Even so, she has outlived eight city managers in her role as library director and department head (in charge of three libraries). Banned books are a pretty big deal at Chisaki’s library, just not in the way you might imagine. National Banned Book Week was launched in 1982 in response to a “sudden surge” in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools, even though banned books are as American as the Puritans who started banning them more than a century before the US became the US. During Banned Book Week citizens and library staff read aloud from the most frequently banned books during twenty minute shifts on the library’s steps.