The first of two community meetings on the future location of a new west-side library got underway Tuesday evening in the Cowell Elementary school cafeteria. It was a full house, nearly 100 people, neighborhood residents, library lovers, lots of men in suits.
Maps covered every table. One for each of the three sites under consideration; one with current library- branch locations. It’s this latter map that is most relevant to the discussion and was most ignored by the people sitting at the tables. They didn’t need to look at it. They know what it shows. Rings 2 miles in diameter, spiraling out and around the Central Library and its branches, like hula hoops flung in every direction across the city — except one. Their own west Denver, the Denver shot through by West Colfax Boulevard and anchored to the south by Sixth Avenue and to the north by West 17th Avenue and Sloan’s Lake.
Were you to travel from the Central Library west to the city limits within those north-south boundaries, you would encounter only one other library branch, Byers, which the mayor has proposed be closed to save money. This has not gone over well in that neighborhood. People are attached to their libraries, and Byers is one of the Carnegie jewel boxes, with stately architecture suggesting that the contents within are to be respected.
City Councilmen Rick Garcia and Paul Lopez each represent part of the territory under consideration for the library, and Tuesday’s meeting was on Lopez’s turf. (Garcia will host today’s public meeting at 6 p.m. at Lake Middle School.)
“This is a neighborhood that has been historically underserved because of numbers that are challenging,” Lopez told the group. “Poverty, educational attainment, dropout rates . . . that makes this conversation all the more important.”
One might not think a library would generate the kind of excitement evident in the room, but a person making such an assumption either underestimates the sense of community a library can create or has not been paying attention to this part of Denver, an oversight with which residents here are familiar.
The neighborhood between Federal and Sheridan boulevards and Sixth and 17th Avenues has been without a library for 55 years. It once housed the Dickinson branch on Hooker Street and West Conejos Place. Dickinson was another Carnegie library, the smallest of eight such branches, and it closed in 1954. Not enough business, said the then-city librarian.
Since then, the two neighborhoods of the area, West Colfax and Villa Park, have become more Latino, Asian, Native American. The Piton Foundation reports 2,700 Denver Public School students live in the combined neighborhoods, 85 percent of whom are low-income and receiving free school lunches. The most recent population estimate put 10,000 people in Villa Park, one-third of whom are under age 18. About 11,000 live in West Colfax, 30 percent of whom are children.
In neighborhoods like this, libraries are necessities — needed not only in a practical sense, for the 50 public computers or the 100,000- item collection. Needed in that libraries hold worlds not yet glimpsed.
Needed in that they are thresholds beyond which everything is still possible.
Construction of a 28,000-square- foot library was approved in the 2007 bond. Twelve million dollars to cover everything from the ground up, inside and out. For a good while, people hoped St. Anthony’s would donate land along West Colfax. St. Anthony’s had other ideas.
On Oct. 15, the eight library commissioners are expected to choose one of three sites: West 17th Avenue and Sheridan, in the southwest corner of Sloan’s Lake park; West Colfax and Yates Street, now occupied by the shuttered, dilapidated Shuffle Inn bar; or Sheridan and West 10th Avenue, along Lakewood Dry Gulch.
Both the Sloan’s Lake and Lakewood Dry Gulch sites would be stand-alone libraries. The Colfax location would be shared with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, which is proposing a ground-floor library topped by four stories of apartments for homeless and low-income individuals and families.
It was clear Tuesday each site has its passionate supporters. Some want the Sloan’s Lake site because the city already owns the land. Or Colfax because it could spur further economic development along a bedraggled avenue. Or 10th Avenue because it lies along a future light-rail station and would draw from the child-filled neighborhoods to the south.
Take into account safety, access, cost of land, said the people in the room. Take into account demographics, parking, community needs.
“The library is a means to an end,” Lopez told the group at meeting’s end. “A book, a pen, a computer: These are the tools we need to move forward.”
Each area resident voted for a preferred site. Given the location of the meeting, the outcome was not surprising. Twenty-five votes for the nearby 10th Avenue site; 16 for Sloan’s Lake; seven for West Colfax.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
