Detroit’s Six Still Standing Carnegies

Detroit is a city of demolished and boarded-up buildings (though not as severely as I feared), so it is no surprise that three of the nine libraries Carnegie funded in Detroit have been leveled and one of the six remaining is boarded-up.  The boarded-up library may have been the most distinguished of the lot, other than the grand main library.

Like the other four still standing branch libraries, it was constructed of red brick and was free of the pillars and domes and other flourishes that highlight many of the Carnegies.  They all had large windows and high ceilings and, those that I could get into, fine woodwork within, and exuded that Carnegie aura of majesty.  For several their most distinctive feature was a sculpture outside or some art within.

The first I came to, the Bowen branch, after biking sixty miles up from Toledo, the nearest city I could get to via Amtrak, as the Detroit line didn’t accommodate bicycles, had a fragment of a Diego Rivera mural with the tiny figure of Rockefeller at the bottom.  The now Hispanic neighborhood had a surge of population shortly after it was built, necessitating an expansion ten years later, the only one it has experienced.  It could use new bathrooms, as the men’s room in the basement was a tiny cell without a sink.  When I told the librarian I was visiting the Carnegies of Detroit, she was more enthusiastic about a handful of libraries built in the 1930s that I ought to visit, a couple with cork floors and one built in the Tudor style.  Detroit has the fourth largest public library system in the US with twenty-one branches, but I only had time for the Carnegies. 

The Conely Branch three miles away had had no addition.  It sat in a large park. There was a sculpture off to the side of two teens perched on a tree stump, both with a book.

The Duffield branch, four miles further, was marked by a railing interweaved with a sculpture of tree limbs.  It too had not been added on to, though it had been renovated ten years ago.  The walls had been left blank with no art or portraits of presidents or significant locals or even Read posters.

The Utley branch two miles away on Woodward, the main east-West avenue through Detroit, was now a childhood care center with a handicapped accessible entrance to its rear and a playground on one side.

I followed  Woodward toward the city center to its main library across the street from the Detroit Institute of Art, which featured an exhibit on the costumes of Star Wars.  Students of nearby Wayne State University strolled by.  The Italian Renaissance style library  constructed of Vermont marble was designed by Cass Gilbert, who also designed the US Supreme Court.

I continued east on Woodward past the Tigers stadium trying to stay clear of the tracks of the light rail system. It was quite perilous in front of each stop, a platform that slightly jutted out making the gap between the track and the side of the road quite narrow.  With my panniers sticking out, it was even more dangerous.  I turned north off Woodward to the boarded-up Ginsberg branch, which wasn’t so easy to find as it was on a small side street that only ran in haphazard segments with a haphazard numbering system.  When I finally found it I had to pass through a break in a high fence that surrounded the property, as the two buildings on it were boarded up.  

As I was photographing it a security guard appeared, shouting, “What are you doing?”  He had never seen a loaded touring bike and feared I was a transient looking for a squat.  But he turned out to the friendliest guy I had encountered since leaving Chicago.  He was enthralled by how far one can range on a bicycle, and we had a pleasant conversation on the bad rap Detroit has taken, as it is much more vital and alive than perceived.

He was just the antidote I needed, as I had had a run-in with one testy person after another, beginning with the Amtrak clerk I had dealt with in Chicago revising a ticket I had bought for Janina to St. Louis.  She wasn’t happy about having to do it and complained about all the effort it took.  Then as I lined up to board the train to Toledo a young man who was among a crowd who had prematurely lined up ahead of seniors and people with children and was blocking the entry threw quite a fit when my bike brushed him.  Our different skin pigmentation might have had something to do with it. The woman he was with had to calm him.  I’d earlier had an unpleasant encounter with a fellow touring cyclist, a guy my age traveling with his wife, who went on and on about non-camping tandeming excursions they’d had in New Zealand and France, renting a bike upon arrival and trying to stick to bike paths.  He asked if I’d done much touring.  I told him a bit, and that I’d just returned from two months in Africa.  That didn’t stop his soliloquy, not even my slight interjections indicating I too had toured in New Zealand and France.

The  majority of librarians I encountered were also somewhat narrow-minded, wary of engaging me in any manner when I expressed interest in their Carnegie heritage. What is happening to human decency?  There was an unmistakable lack of respect for Carnegie.  Not one of the six Carnegies I visited, including the Main Library, acknowledged Carnegie in any way—not with a plaque or his portrait or his name anywhere on the library.  The strong labor interests in the city evidently suppressed any homage to the steel tycoon.  One of the branch librarians even told me that the city had refused his grant for the Main Library.  I told her Wikipedia still referred to it as a Carnegie-funded library.  She called over to the library to find out and was surprised to learn that Carnegie had indeed contributed to its funding.  The librarian wasn’t alone in being misinformed.  Another branch librarian told me the same thing when I told her the Main Library was next on my itinerary.  The two librarians I spoke to there acknowledged Carnegie’s contribution, but unlike most small town librarians did not light up with pride that theirs was a Carnegie.  

It wasn’t until the Carnegie in Mount Clemens, twenty miles north of Detroit, that Carnegie pride resurfaced with a large plaque out front celebrating his contribution to this library and hundreds of others all across the country, although it got the number wrong.  It was 1,679, not 1,681.

The library was now an Art Center, but there was no mistaking its former life as a Carnegie Library.

A gentle breeze from the south had not only brought almost spring time temperatures of the 50s after nothing but 30s and 40s since my return from Africa three weeks ago, it propelled me to 97 miles by then with still an hour until dark. I had more vigor in my legs than I could have hoped for after an uneven night of sleep—four hours on the train before its arrival in Toledo at three am and then another four hours in the station on a bench.  I had to go another ten miles from Mount Clemens before I could find a place to camp.  I bypassed a most inviting cemetery and a thick forest a couple miles beyond, as there was too much traffic to slip into them without the risk of being reported by a suspicious motorist knowing what I was up to.  The forest I chose in a park along a river was not as isolated as I would have preferred, as I could see the lights of a couple of homes through the trees, but it was late and cold enough by then not to worry about anyone being out.

I’ll be camping out one more night before I’ll be sleeping indoors when I visit Rick in Lansing and then Kirk in Battle Creek as I head home visiting a handful more Carnegies and getting my legs tuned up before leaving for France a week after I return.