When scanning through the capital budget the other week, I noticed a curious line item: Half a million bucks for a "state of the art" facility to hold the District's archives. What's wrong with the current facility, exactly? And don't we have enough places that want to serve as repositories for D.C.'s historical artifacts?
At the [...]
Peanuts for the Central Library.
I'm still digesting the $6 billion, no-new-taxes budget that Mayor Vince Gray dropped on Friday. The first headline grabbers were attempts to raise revenue: Extended hours for alcohol sales, new automatic speeding cameras, a centralized system to make sure you've paid your taxes and fines, and more performance parking. Then [...]
Back in November, we got the gist of what an expert panel would recommend for D.C.'s aging central library: Either build two more floors on top and lease part of the building to another tenant, or sell the building and move the library somewhere else. Today, they released their full report, which makes even more [...]
Over the past week, a panel of real estate, marketing, and library experts have been interviewing dozens of local figures, pouring over market statistics, and touring the surrounding neighborhoods to figure out what to do with Washington's central library. The experts, coordinated by the Urban Land Institute at a cost of $125,000, evaluated three scenarios: [...]
The MLK library lobby, soon after opening. (DCPL archives)
After reading my column last week about D.C.'s new libraries, Arts Desk contributor and Mies geek Kriston Capps rose to the defense of our much-maligned central library. Here's his response.
When Mayor Anthony Williams took on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library toward the end of [...]
D.C. Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper’s office, on the fourth floor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, is in some ways a reminder of failure: It’s too big, and a set of fraying modernist chairs, original to the 1973 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe building, have grown too delicate to sit on. Cooper, a [...]
