Au Revoir, Allentown!

Today is the last day that the LYNCS outreach staff of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh will be providing library services at 1206 Arlington Avenue. This is a bittersweet transition for our department and our organization, after spending 2.5 years in this location, bringing library programming and services, and forming partnerships in this Hilltop neighborhood.

In what began as the Pop-up Library in Allentown, our initially scheduled eighteen months in this space ended up becoming a year longer, thanks in a large part to a grant from the Birmingham Foundation and our partners at the Brashear Association. The Brashear Association is a non-profit providing services to families and children out of their offices on the South Side of Pittsburgh.  Our relationship with the Brashear Association began with some simple after school programming at the pop-up library on a monthly basis through which we discovered shared goals, especially where children are involved. Their continued partnering and presence in the space soon highlighted the fact that a need on the Hilltop was being met through the activities and programming in this neighborhood storefront by the library staff, and thus encouraged them to continue to do the same through their afterschool program and summer camp.

We had some great moments over the 2.5 years – lots of fun programs, and we met so many great people. We’re so happy that the children and adults will continue to be served by the Brashear Association in their new space just around the corner on Warrington Avenue, and where we will continue to partner with them through occasional children and adult programming. You can follow their wonderful work at their Brashear Kids blog: http://www.brashearkids.com/

In the words of one of our pop-up library users:

Maria J.

Getting to Know Allentown All Over Again

Today we welcome another new blogger to the Eleventh Stack team, Maria J. You’ll be getting her take on the Carnegie Library, and librarianship in general, monthly from now on.

As a staff member of the CLP LYNCS (Library in Your Neighborhood, Community and School) department of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, I have had the pleasure of working in the Allentown neighborhood of Pittsburgh since October 2012.  Carnegie Library has established a temporary pop-up library at the corner of Arlington and Warrington Avenues in the southern Hilltop neighborhood, with the goals of bringing library service and creating community connections through February of 2014.

You can like the pop-up library on Facebook here

Allentown is one of those little surprises in the city of Pittsburgh which may only be recognizable to many for the reputation it has garnered through some unfortunate stories in the news. I have known this neighborhood since my childhood, when my siblings and I would come from Ohio to visit relatives who lived on the South Side slopes. It was a sense of homecoming for me to be able to come back to the community after decades of change–change for both me, and for this neighborhood.

While there are more empty lots and empty storefronts in Allentown these days, what hasn’t changed is the fact that these hills are filled with friends, families, and children. You may not realize this, as you travel along Warrington or Arlington on your way to the South Side or the other Hilltop communities, but if you were to stop in at the Pop-up, you’d soon realize the vibrancy of the neighborhood.

The little storefront which houses this temporary library quickly fills up with a variety of people and sounds. The clicking of keyboards and the laughter of children are often mixed with music from YouTube videos watched by patrons, the sound of ukuleles occasionally used in our programming, or the echo of traffic rushing by on Arlington Avenue on those days when we prop open the front door. The day I’m writing this happens to be a school holiday, and there are folks ranging from preschool to retirement in this little storefront-cum-library. While the adult patrons may be searching for jobs or reconnecting with old friends online, the younger kids are playing games on our iPads or XBOX, or creating works of art at the craft table we’ve set up to keep them busy during the day. This is definitely not your grandmother’s library, but nevertheless, the neighborhood grandmothers are no strangers to it!

Many of our visitors are familiar faces to us now after our having been here for nearly a year. They’ve become our friends, and sometimes we spend more time with them during the day than we do with our own families. We have made friends with young and old alike: staff and visitors have come to know and interact with each other on a first name basis, and we have come to know their personal stories, too. These are stories you couldn’t imagine by driving quickly along the cross streets, full of presumptions about the Hilltop neighborhood, but they are stories to which many of us can relate: stories of happiness and heartbreak, of homework troubles and homelessness, and also stories of hope. And every day, with each new visitor, we are introduced to another story, another friend, and, hopefully, soon, a familiar face and name.

–Maria J.