On a sweaty afternoon in a battered Bronx neighborhood, a little girl in shorts and a turquoise shirt peered through the glass door of the brand-new Sedgwick branch library and had a vision. Spotting a gray-suited security guard, she declared, "I see a man with a tuxedo."
Libraries do that to people. All that knowledge waiting to be unbound, making almost anything seem possible. Even gray polyester magically becomes elegant.
The Sedgwick branch -- the first library built in the Bronx in a decade and one of just a handful built in the city in recent years -- has added that touch of promise to Morris Heights, which became emblematic of the South Bronx in its decline and now symbolizes its fight to recover.
During the era of neglect and abandonment in the 1960's and 70's, the library was in the basement of a housing project, where it was subjected to periodic soakings from the building's leaky plumbing. In the mid-1980's, as the neighborhood began its transition, the library moved temporarily to a former Chinese takeout restaurant on University Avenue, squeezed between the Elegence #2 Unisex Beauty Salon and La Preferida Superette.
Now, amid an explosion of new houses and renovated low- and moderate-income apartments, the library, too, has a new home.
The branch, at 176th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, formerly University Avenue, opened last month with much fanfare. It is a one-story building of concrete blocks that anchors a row of small grocery stores and shops selling everything from discount meats to plastic toys. The library hardly appears out of place, looking like a book bodega with its red neon sign reading "Sedgwick Branch Library" hung in a window behind a metal security grate.
Little more than a year ago, the library site was a vacant lot. "This was a junkyard with a big gate and a bunch of garbage," said Lovell Jennings, 15, who was waiting for the library to open one recent afternoon. "They just cleaned it up and built a library."
It was, of course, a little more complicated than that.
'Through the Wringer'
Longtime neighborhood residents like Inez Ford fought for years for a library, arguing "there are too many people who can't read and write." Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx Borough President, who went to college in the late 1960's at the old New York University Bronx campus, just north of Morris Heights, paid special attention. "The community has been through the wringer for a generation," he said.
The 3,500-square-foot branch was built through the New York Public Library's Adopt-a-Branch program, with $1 million in public funds and a $500,000 grant from the Louis Calder Foundation. "The population was growing," said Billy Kenny, a library spokesman. "It's a poor neighborhood and a lot of times in a poorer neighborhood the library's services are more essential."
No other service seems quite so essential as a sanctuary for children. Within an hour of the library's daily opening at 2 P.M. one recent afternoon, about 40 people were there, mostly children in their early teens.
"We didn't have anything to do," said Juan Peralta, 13. "We had no baseball practice. There's nothing to do in the streets, so we came to the library."
Juan was sitting at a small table, his elbows leaning on two books, one about Willie Mays and the other about Hank Aaron, and searching for the odd and elusive traveler in the book "Where's Waldo?"
Juan's best friend, Manuel Boya, 12, explained his library habits this way: "They open at 2; I'm here at 1:30."
The two boys are serious readers. "There's a book called 'Free at Last,' " Manuel said. "It's about African-American slaves."
Juan chimed in: "Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman."
"You read it?" Manuel asked.
"Yeah."
Talking About Dreams
Manuel, with a matter-of-fact manner and soft brown eyes, has some dreams, and the relative quiet of the library seemed like a good place to talk about them.
"When I grow up, I want to be a lawyer," he said. "A sports lawyer like -- this is an example -- if Jordan gets hurt, he would come to me."
"I want to be a baseball player," Juan said.
"That's not a good job, because if you get hurt they don't pay you," Manuel said.
But that's in the future. Now the boys were heading home. Outside the new, neat library, an overflowing garbage can spilled trash onto the sidewalk. As one boy delicately put it, the neighborhood, where abandoned buildings are still evident, is a "so-so situation."
"It's hot," Manuel said. "There's a lot of drug dealers but I stay away from them. They just say hi to me."
Alan LaRue, the Sedgwick librarian, said he saw the library as "a beacon of hope" in the community.
The collection has many books in Spanish and French, for recent immigrants from the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries, and for French-speaking Africans.
To protect against graffiti, glazed concrete was used for the walls and a circular community room attached to the library was made with stainless-steel panels, said David W. Prendergast, the building's architect. The windows are protected by metal mesh. "We tried to design them in a playful way to try to belie their true function, which is to keep someone from throwing a brick through a window," Mr. Prendergast said.
"We used straightforward, tough materials," he said.
A Neighborhood Reborn
Debbie Ruiz, 36, has lived through the transitions of the neighborhood. She moved there as a teen-ager, when University Avenue was filled with shops owned by Jewish, Irish, Italian and Greek merchants. She said the decline of the 1960's accelerated in the 1970's, especially during the blackout of 1977, when many stores were looted and trashed, never to reopen.
But in the last 10 years or so, within a 10-block radius of the Sedgwick branch, more than 30 vacant public-housing apartment buildings have been renovated, as have countless other private apartment buildings, said Adolfo Carrion, the district manager of Community Board No. 5. Three blocks from the library, a development of 78 two-family town houses has been built.
Ms. Ruiz, a bookkeeper, and her husband, a city Parks Department worker, bought one of those houses a year and a half ago. They sell for $219,000, of which the state subsidizes $65,000, she said. It is a community of working people, but sometimes, she said, they feel apart from the neighborhood. She said there was a drug house near the development and that occasionally there was gunfire from the roof of the house.
"It's frustrating where you have a homeowner who is working hard for their home and maybe 10 feet away, there is a public-housing building with people who are on public assistance and really don't care if you don't like their garbage in your backyard," she said.
She said the construction of the library was a sign of rebirth, physical and spiritual. But as with the neighborhood, the future of the library hangs in the balance.
"The library is significant because of what it represents," Ms. Ruiz said. "It represents education. It represents learning. I just hope the building stays as nice as it is now."
