Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting MLK Library. I met some nice security guards. I took in the expansive first-floor room. It actually looked bright and clean. There were plenty of staff. The lines were orderly. I thought: this is a new day for D.C.’s flagship library!

I then joined two other patrons on the elevator. Between the first and second floors, I thought: Wow, these elevators are actually modern looking. A woman exited on the second floor. Then the doors closed.

Then nothing.

“I don’t think we’re moving,” I told the lady next to me.

I have claustrophobia. Bad. I actually got a case of it at the Uptown–crammed into a sold-out showing of Indiana Jones actually gave me the sweats. I had to chew on a straw to calm down. After an extra moment of no elevator movement, I could feel my heart hitting the panic mode.

I thought: Maybe I should chew gum.

Instead I exclaimed: “Oh, God. What do we do?”

The lady and I began to press buttons. Any buttons.

Then she noticed I wasn’t being so brave.

“Now don’t go chicken on me!” she said.

Perhaps the best putdown I’ve ever received.

A moment later the door opened to the second floor again. I thought: Freedom. I dashed off the elevator. “I’m going to take the stairs,” I told the lady.

The lady seemed relieved that we would no longer be riding together.

This guy I know (OK, I’m married to him) has a simple theory about the District: There are two types of people, those who make it a great place to live and those who make you want to scream. Last night I encountered a card-carrying member of the latter group at the MLK Library.

This was at the famed Washingtoniana room on the third floor, the go-to spot to research D.C. neighborhoods. Or maybe it’s not so famous, because when I called the main number of the library to ask if this room would be open during regular library hours, I talked to someone who seemingly had never heard of it. She gave me another number to call, an automated message with general hours and the location. Screw it, I said, and hopped on the 42 bus to take my chances.

The room was, indeed, open and the librarian in there was, at first, nice enough. She pointed me to the stacks, gave me a bibliography binder that has seen better days, and told me to start with the books. When I was done with those, she said, I could come back and she would pull some hanging files for me. I could not pull them myself, she let me know, and I could not check them out. Fair enough. I dug into the books, only when I was ready for the hanging files, she was about two minutes into her 45-minute high-decibel telephone diatribe about some loan she couldn’t pay off, about how she was going to have to use credit-card checks, about how no one understood her predicament.

By the time she had finished, I didn’t have time to go through all the hanging files. That guy I mentioned (my husband) was leaving to come pick me up and called my cell to tell me so. I talked quietly until I heard the librarian say to me in her now-familiar take-no-prisoners tone: “Miss! Miss! If you’re going to talk on the phone, you’ll have to go outside or go into the hall!”

I get it, I really do. I hate cell phones, loathe them. They are a menace to civility and should have no place in a library. But c’mon, lady. I just listened to you berate someone for almost an hour.

And, while I’m at it, I might as well bring it: As a member of both the D.C. Library system and the Arlington Library system, I’ve concluded that the difference between them is the equivalent of spending six hours at the Half Street inspection station listening to DMV workers bitch about their supervisor and getting a foot rub while a valet parks your car and has it detailed.

Oh, and the drinking fountains at Arlington libraries? Water comes out of them. Amazing.

Since shuttering in 2004, the Benning Neighborhood Library lost its books and gained several battles between city officials and Northeast activists.

In 2006, the city introduced plans to transform the building into a mixed-use facility with the library, artists’ spaces, and apartments. Neighbors hated the idea.

Last June, when the city applied for a demolition permit, a group of activists again united in protest: They sued Mayor Adrian Fenty and several other District officials.

“If you see [the city] as misinformed motherfuckers, then you deal with them that way. But if you see them as dirty bastards who are taking something from you…and you start there, then you can get in a position where you can fight them,” one plaintiff, Rick Tingling-Clemmons, told the City Paper last July.

Interesting choice of phrasing—but ultimately not effective. A judge at first postponed the demo, but the city eventually got its way, tearing down the facility last October.

Still, activists believe they got something out of all the legal paperwork: In the ongoing clash of transparency and openness vs. the District of Columbia, the city has suffered a blow. According to an order issued by a judge in late December, the city failed to provide its plans and zoning changes within 30 days to the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission. Now, as the city considers moving the proposed library from its current location, it is required to provide a detailed explanation, says plaintiff and attorney Jane Zara.

“The big thing that needed to be enforced was the authority and the standing of the ANCs,” says Robin Diener, director of the Library Renaissance Project. “The library had never, in the history of DCPL, notified the ANCs.…It’s unfortunate we had to go to court to enforce that,” she says. “But we did.”

As with any Ludwig Mies van der Rohe building, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library runs on perfect symmetry. If something goes wrong, like a dead light bulb or a broken window, it immediately sticks out.

In September, Eric Coard, the chief business officer with D.C. Public Library, noticed a crack in a window on the flagship library’s fourth floor. The window, located at the end of a corridor, faces 9th Street NW. The crack, he says, was 12 inches long and looked “just like a snake.” “I thought it posed a danger,” he explains, adding that the glass was promptly removed and replaced with wood. The problem is that window has remained boarded up. Coard says a finalized contract to fix the window should be imminent.

“It’s gone on a little longer than I would have liked,” Coard admits. “We’re just trying to get the window replaced now.”

Check this out, from the Washington Times: “All but 12″ of the D.C. public libraries “have been closed on Sundays as of Nov. 11. The closures are expected to last until the end of January.”

Now, why could this be? Renovations? No. Budgetary problems? No.

Get this: Library staff have built up too much vacation leave, and they’re using it all at the end of the year, so D.C. residents are out of luck. This is an old, old problem in the arena of personnel management, and companies and municipalities across the country have found ways to avoid having their people take all their years of accumulated vacation time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Not the District, apparently.

My favorite, though, is this quote from DCPL spokesperson: “Unlike most agencies, DCPL is open to serve the public on Saturdays and Sundays,” Kandace Foreman told the Times.

Two things: Not this winter you’re not. And, hey, you’re the goddamn library–of course you’re supposed to be open on weekends. That’s like saying, “Unlike most barber shops, hospitals are open on Mondays.”

This past week, I had the pleasure of visiting Hart Middle School’s newly renovated library. It was a nice and bright place. But it was also pretty empty of books. Many of the shelves were not close to full. In early November, the school tossed most of its books into a pair of dumpsters. The school’s principal claimed the books were too old.

The school’s librarian, Martin Ezeagu, took it a step further claiming that those old paperbacks were extreme health hazards. He told me that every time he touches them, he must wash his hands. He then demonstrated how he washes his hands in a sink located behind the tiny reference section.

But he said sometimes even warm water and soap wouldn’t save him from that dog-eared copy of Invisible Man. Ezeagu told me: “Some of the books are so old they cause cancer.”

So is the Library of Congress just a giant cancer factory? Are old books as unhealthy as cigarettes? Or is this just some DCPS myth?

If you’re thinking about heading down to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 9th and G Streets NW, bring your own water—but don’t drink too much of it. The library’s water fountains are almost all broken, and the bathrooms aren’t too much better. According to one librarian, none of the fountains are working; two on the second floor are just barely flowing in that “drink at your own peril, you don’t know how many lips have been on this fountain” sort of way. It’s easier to find a ceiling leak—four by the second floor northeast stairway alone—than a working fountain. Meanwhile, the women’s bathrooms on the second and third floors are both out, and the one down in the basement smells like a dirty-diaper dumping ground. People generally avoid books these days, but it’s nice to know a library is giving you few more reasons.

While the country is on the topic of bathroom trysts, it may want to peer into the archives of Washington City Paper. This piece, by yours truly, provides a deep look at the scene at the MLK Jr. library circa 1997. Give it a read.

There’ve been some great upgrades at the historic Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 9th and G Streets NW, including new elevators, lots of computers, Wi-Fi, plus renovations in key areas.

Just don’t drink the water!

The new report of the Environmental Working Group on D.C. tap water has found that water taken from MLK was among the most contaminated.

No doubt greedy downtown developers will put this on their list of talking points as they seek to scoop up this prime piece of real estate.

Don’t tear down MLK, the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board said on Thursday.

The board granted historic-landmark status to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, giving the deteriorating glass-and-steel building a legal protection against getting demolished.

Former Mayor Anthony A. Williams broached a plan last year to sell the building and build a new central library on the old Convention Center site. The board’s decision came a day after the Washington Examiner reported the Adrian Fenty administration’s decision to shelve Williams’ plans.

Now, thanks to the efforts of former D.C. Public Library trustee Alex Padro, the library has been protected as D.C.’s most notable example of modernist architecture; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed it in 1972. It is also the only downtown edifice that bears King’s name.

The city supported the historic-landmark application, something that Padro says could not have happened when Williams was mayor. “For years there was this battle raging between Williams and the library preservation and advocacy community,” Padro says. “Finally, [now] that we have a new administration, and Williams is out of the way…we get the board to approve it.”

Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper says there are no plans yet for any relocation of the library’s services. As for the building, the board will now have to approve any change to the first floor or the exterior. “We don’t know at this point that [MLK] will not always be the library,” Cooper says. “We also don’t know at this point that [it] will always be the library.”

I went to the Lamond-Riggs Neighborhood Library over the weekend. According to the online catalogue, it was the only branch of the D.C. Public Library with a copy, actually three, of a book I’d been trying to get my hands on (the only historical account of amphetamine use in the U.S., if you must know).

I got to the library, hunted in the stacks and didn’t find my book. So I marched over to the librarian. She looked it up on her version of the catalog and scoffed. “Oh, this book is gone,” she said. “It’s old.”

The book hadn’t been reported missing or discarded, mind you. It was just really old—1975—and the library couldn’t be expected to hold onto old books. “We’re not an archive,” she said.

I can understand the necessity of thinning the stock every once in a while. A lot of crap gets published. And a lot of that crap gets quickly outdated. But this was a useful, semi-academic text. And no one has written anything like it since, so throwing it away actually blots out a speedy little chunk of history. And why, oh why, is it still in the catalog?!

Despite the news that the Georgetown Boys & Girls Club might be sold, the staffers at the Jelleff branch have reached out to a facility facing a more uncertain future: the Georgetown public library.

Bob Stowers, the branch’s director, says that library officials have called him to see about annexing the library’s now-homeless children’s programs to his facility. “I am going to do everything I can to make it work,” he says, adding that the relocation plan may include the library taking over some part of the branch’s parking lot.

Monica Lewis, spokesperson for the D.C. Public Library, says nothing formal has yet crossed her desk concerning this arrangement. She does note that others are jumping in to help out. Today, the fire department announced that it, too, wanted to get familiar with the works of J.K. Rowling, saying that it would make some room at a nearby fire house to host children’s programs.

Lewis says there are plans to repurpose a bookmobile as well. The mobile has room for roughly five computers, equipped with WiFi, as well as a small collection of books. No word yet, Lewis adds, on where the mobile will be idling. “We hope within a few blocks of the current Georgetown library,” she says. The Jelleff branch is a block away.

And not to be outdone, the Washington Conservation Guild announced today [PDF] that it will be donating proceeds from a fundraiser to help preserve materials damaged by the fire. No matter what, the guild has the other orgs beat in the charity sweepstakes—they were there first. Guild members were able to get a freezer truck and painting conservator to the scene as the library was still smoldering.

For those that need a little Preservation 101: Sarah Stauderman, a Guild board member, explains the use of a freezer truck this way: “Freezing is typically what we do with paper-based materials when they’ve been exposed to water. If you leave something that’s wet out, mold will grow on it….Freezing gives you the time to get together your resources, to develop a plan of triage.”

The Benning Neighborhood Library has been closed since December 2004, leaving lots of Ward 7 residents wondering when their community will be served by something more than occasional bookmobiles and a tiny kiosk in nearby Deanwood.

At a mid-February meeting of the Ward 7 Leadership Council, they thought they finally had an answer: D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, attendees say, proposed rebuilding the Benning branch at the District Office of Employment Services (OES) site, currently under construction next to the Minnesota Avenue Metro station.

Whether it was a plan or just a remark, residents and community leaders have seized on his proposal, and Gray seems to have unwittingly stepped into a hornet’s nest.

“The library going there would be a great addition to the community,” says Villareal Johnson, an advisory neighborhood commissioner who was at the meeting. He cites the poor location of the original library as a reason to support the move. “But they need to put a library up as soon as possible because [the OES] project is still two years away.”

Others are not so amenable to the prospects of relocation. “It’s a big no-no,” says Juanita Montague, president of the Friends of Benning Library. “What we really want is our library reopened or rebuilt. We are not interested in relocating.”

Gray did not return several calls for comment. Monica Lewis, a spokesperson for the D.C. Public Library, says, “We are aware of this matter but we have had no formal discussion with Chairman Gray or any other city official.”

“It does seem that this was an off-the-cuff remark,” says Robin Diener, project coordinator for the D.C. Library Renaissance Project, a nonprofit that deals with library issues. “Quite a number of people heard this information and thought it was a plan,” she says.

The D.C. Public Library Board of Trustees is among the more opaque of the city’s many nontransparent entities. The board convenes in private before its monthly public meetings, so its decision-making process is largely hidden from view.

Certainly things weren’t fully explained at the board’s Aug. 9 meeting, when board president John W. Hill blandly made a controversial announcement: The president of the Federation of Friends of the D.C. Library, an umbrella organization for the groups of volunteers and donors who support neighborhood libraries, would no longer have a seat at the table with the board.

The change, Hill noted cryptically, was made after a study of “best practices” at other library systems.

Even though the Federation of Friends’ position on the board was a nonvoting one, some members of the group were angered. Federation President Richard Huffine called the move “blatantly illegal” and “against their by-laws.” Two days later, Hill said the board would reconsider the action.

At the Jan. 17 trustees meeting, it did. Hill introduced a motion to restore the federation’s nonvoting seat by recommending that “we as a board state our intentions to work very closely with the Friends on matters that come before the board.” The brief discussion that followed was without substance, and the motion passed on a unanimous voice vote.

There’s still no word on what constitutes “best practices.” But whatever they are, apparently they’ve changed.

“What’s the urgency?” asked Councilmember Marion S. Barry Jr. That was one of the many unanswered questions the evening of Tuesday, Dec. 5, when Barry’s lame-duck colleague Kathy Patterson tried yet again—and failed yet again—to win D.C. Council approval for a plan to build a new central library on the old Convention Center site.

Over the last year, the library scheme has been peddled vigorously by outgoing Mayor Tony Williams and the Board of Library Trustees and the Federal City Council, both of which are headed by John W. Hill. But the need for a new library is questionable, the financing plan shaky, the proposed location controversial, and many of the proponents’ arguments so dubious that they’ve gradually evaporated over the course of the debate.

Legislation to abandon the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 901 G St. NW and authorize a new library seemed to have died on Tuesday, Nov. 21, when the D.C. Council’s Education, Libraries, and Recreation Committee voted to table it. Yet Patterson and her allies decided to keep pushing, even though they clearly didn’t have the nine votes necessary to pass the authorization as an emergency bill. Instead, they tried a rarely-used gambit: a full-council vote to discharge the bill from committee. That required a simple majority of the 12 members present, but even that wasn’t doable: Only six voted for it.

In addition to Patterson, the aye votes were Linda Cropp, Vincent Orange, Adrian Fenty, Jack Evans, and Phil Mendelson. (The first three of those will leave public office with the next term.) Aside from Barry, voting no were Kwame Brown, David Catania, Jim Graham, Vincent Gray, and Carol Schwartz.

The supporters of a new library mostly reiterated arguments made by Williams and Hill, and generally seemed unfamiliar with the issue. A distracted Fenty commended the mayor’s “blue ribbon task force” on the library, which recently published a report that’s an embarrassing goulash of cliché, boilerplate, and irrelevancy. Orange floated by on a cloud, comparing MLK unfavorably to Paris’ Bibliotheque Nationale—which is, of course, the French equivalent of the Library of Congress, not a city library.

The opponents’ remarks were more pungent. Barry termed the claim that a new D.C. library would become a tourist attraction “idiocy”; Brown said the arguments for a new library are “foolishness”; and Schwartz called expectations of major federal funding “just craziness.” It was Barry who nailed the weakness of the case for a new library. It was apparent, he said, that advocates of the scheme just decided they wanted the library “and then went back to try to justify it.” A 6–6 vote says they didn’t.