Hamilton Libraries: Something To Answer For

The other day I wrote a post called Hamilton's Vindication, with a link to a story detailing Hamilton Mayor Bob Bratina's invitation to author Margaret Atwood to tour the Central Library facilities. I suggested that Hamilton was enjoying a burgeoning reputation as a magnet for the arts, and that Toronto, its traditional rival down the road, was suffering a real loss of cachet thanks to the depredations being contemplated by the philistines at their City Hall (aka the Ford brothers and their wrecking crew). There was, in all honesty, an element of gloating to my post.

To be fair, Hamilton's hands are not entirely clean when it comes to its libraries. Yesterday, Spec civic affairs columnist Andrew Dreschel wrote a piece entitled Let’s make sure Atwood hears the full story, reminding people of the fact that the Picton branch, located in a poor area of Hamilton, was closed in 2009 to free up $140,000. To put the proposed Toronto closures into perspective, the article suggests the closing was justified, and did little harm to those affected.

In today's Spectator, there is an excellent rebuttal to that assertion by Hamilton reader Kathleen Moore. While I am providing a link to that rebuttal, due to the often ephemeral nature of online letters to the editor, I am also taking the liberty of reproducing her thoughtful response below:

Picton closure hurt a community

Re: Atwood should hear the Picton story (Column, Aug. 12)

I was a volunteer at the Picton Library branch and three generations of my immediate family frequented that branch. I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase “If you build it, they will come.” The opposite is true as well, “if you unbuild it, they will stop coming.”

I watched as the branch brought in fewer and fewer books, cut programs and then drastically cut hours of operation. Of course, visitors and borrowing rates fell. The library board had engineered its own excuse to close the branch.

This all occurred before the excellent exposure given by The Hamilton Spectator Code Red series.

It is difficult to believe that in this day and age there are people who are unaware that illiteracy leads to poverty, which then leads to ill health and early decline. All of these things take a great toll on our society as a whole.

One of the largest housing projects in the city is at Strachan and James Street North. It is full of single-parent families and immigrants. Many of them don’t speak English or speak it as a second language. These are the people who can least afford to access an alternative to a public library. These are the people who are already battling a system that seems determined to keep them down. These are the people who were most comfortable in the atmosphere of a neighbourhood branch library.

To close a library branch in an area of the city where it can do the most good is counterproductive, and in the long run costs all of us far more than keeping that one little branch open and offering literacy skills to those who need them the most.

I can’t help but feel this great sacrifice was made so funds could be used for the bright and shiny new branches that have been built in the “burbs.” Pretty is as pretty does, and yes, I’d love to sit and chat with Margaret Atwood about the real cost associated with our library system, and I would tell her that when the focus of “long-term strategic thinking” is the bottom line, and we look at our library system as a separate entity and independent business instead of as a basic societal necessity, we all pay a much greater price in the long run.

I was opposed, and am still opposed, to the closing of Picton Library Branch.

Kathleen Moore, Hamilton

Hamilton's Vindication?

While long regarded as something of a provincial backwater vis-a-vis its 'world-class' cousin 70 kilometres down the highway, the City of Hamilton is surely feeling a measure of cultural vindication now that the barbarians have breached the gates of Toronto.

As reported in the Toronto Star, world-renowned Margaret Atwood (despite her apparent obscurity to the Ford clan), has received and accepted an invitation from Hamilton Mayor Bob Bratina to visit and tour Hamilton's central library, an institution that recently underwent a multi-million dollar publically-funded renovation to better serve the people.

Responding to the insult hurled at her by Doug Ford, the Toronto mayor's brother (who said that if Atwood walked by, “I wouldn’t have a clue who she is” ) Mayor Bratina had this to say:

“We’re very proud of our Canadian cultural icons and regret that there was any question that Margaret Atwood’s stature might be dismissed in any way,” he said. “There’s a regrettable backwoods feeling to all this and it’s not right, it’s not true.”

Hamilton, which is quickly building a solid reputation for welcoming and supporting the arts as an important economic driver, is attracting a substantial number of artists from the Toronto area, both on the basis of cheap rents and land prices and an increasingly cosmopolitan attitude that only cities such as Toronto used to be able to lay claim to.