The Dickinson Branch Library was built in 1913 on Hooker Street and West Conejos Place, just a block north of West Colfax Avenue. It closed in 1954, a lifespan of about 40 years, which is too short, as far as I am concerned, but I am biased toward libraries, especially old ones with their worn wooden floors and their hardback books with spines that pop and crackle like so many grandmothers getting up off their couches.
The Dickinson branch was one of eight branch libraries that the money of industrialist Andrew Carnegie built in Denver. It also was the smallest but elegant in the way of all Carnegie libraries.
At the time it was used, the neighborhood was Jewish, so Dickinson was called the Jewish Library. It was well-used and loved, and to this day Dr. Jerome Greene, who grew up across the street from it, displays a photo of himself as a toddler posing in front of the building. Oh, he tells me, it was a beautiful place.
When Dickinson closed, the librarian at the time said it was because the demographics of the neighborhood had changed and demand was dropping. In its last year of life, only 269 people applied for library cards, raising the total number of registered borrowers to 1,340.
The death of a library is an occasion for mourning. In the silence of its absence, a restlessness can take root. Perhaps its spirit lingers for years. That would be one way to explain the 13-years-and-counting, bring-the-library-back campaign of Eric Duran.
Thirteen years trying to bring a library to a neighborhood that has had none for 55 years. Thirteen years of gathering support and letters and allies as the neighborhood changed, becoming more Latino, with Asian and Jewish enclaves. It’s growing younger. It’s now poorer than the city as a whole, though its western half is gentrifying. Today, about 11,000 people live in the neighborhood, according to the Piton Foundation.
The closest libraries are the Central Library downtown, the Woodbury Branch on West 33rd Avenue and Federal Boulevard and the Ross-Barnum Branch near Lowell Boulevard and West First Avenue. All are about 3 miles away.
“I was 28 when I first started on this,” the 41-year-old Duran tells me, sounding surprised himself at the passage of time.
He grew up a block and a half away from the Dickinson branch and walked by it on his way to middle school. By then, it had long been closed and had begun its series of metamorphoses, all of which seemed to end with the old building looking the same way: forlorn.
“It just made an impression on me,” says Duran, an investment banker.
When then-Mayor Wellington Webb offered him a seat on the library commission in 1996, he took it and promptly proposed buying the old Dickinson library. At the time, it was owned by a man who was contemplating turning it into condos.
It didn’t work out. Duran abandoned the idea of buying the old library and began focusing on building a new one. Thus began a long journey of one frustration after another.
Why haven’t you just walked away? I ask him.
He laughs. “It’s never occurred to me that we would stop fighting. It’s taken on a life of its own. Lots of people have worked on this now. This is our neighborhood. It’s important.”
The library project is now closer to fruition than it’s ever been. In November 2007, Denver voters approved the construction of three new branch libraries at about $12 million apiece. One would be in the West Colfax neighborhood. A few possible locations have been proposed, but sites have narrowed to a parking lot along West Colfax Avenue on the grounds of St. Anthony Central Hospital.
And therein lies the rub. Duran’s not coming to me just because he has a good story to tell. He’s coming to me because he wants to light a fire under the chairs of the powers that be at St. Anthony.
The hospital is relocating, after all. Moving to Lakewood, leaving behind most of its 16-acre site for redevelopment. What will be built there has been the talk of many task-force meetings. The relocation is now a few years behind schedule, City Councilman Rick Garcia tells me, and the state of the economy has left things in some flux. He says the latest word is that the property will be vacated by 2012.
Garcia has been talking to hospital executives about donating the land for a 28,000-square-foot library, with room for 100 adjacent parking spaces. That the discussion has moved slowly would be an understatement. We’re talking years now. Garcia and city librarian Shirley Amore recently sent hospital executives a letter asking for a decision by this month.
“I’m optimistic we can still work things out,” Garcia says. “But we need some movement on this now.”
I didn’t get much from hospital chief executive Peter Makowski, who is out of the office this week. He did say via e-mail that the discussions are ongoing and would continue.
When a site is found, the community will have its say on what it will look like and what it should house.
It’s not likely to look anything like the old Dickinson library, which is owned by an architect now. But it will be a library in a neighborhood that needs one, and to Duran and all the people who have worked on this over the years, that’s all that matters — a library, homeless no longer.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
