Santa Barbara’s Eastside Library Revamps on $240K Bequest

David Petry

March 13, 2010 — Santa Barbara’s distinctive community library, the Eastside branch, reopened their main room today after undergoing a $240,000 makeover.

As the time approached for the official opening at noon, children crowded towards the front door, clearly eager to get in. Irene Macias, Santa Barbara Public Library system’s Director, spoke to the crowd, thanking local resident Rose Karat for her generous bequest to the library. She also thanked the staff and Friends of the Library for their focus and hard work. She reminded people what a great resource the Eastside library is for the community.

Mayor Helene Schneider took the mic and reminded the local residents of the cloud hovering over public services with millions in budget cuts at hand. “We tend to take libraries for granted. But we shouldn’t take them for granted. This is a place where the community learns and grows and meets each other.”

When Marivel Zambrano-Esparza, the Eastside Library branch supervisor, spoke, she thanked her staff, the Friends of the Eastside Library, the city Public Works department for the work they did on the remodel, and the community. She repeated the speech in Spanish and as soon as she allowed, the children rushed inside where they were once again brought up short, this time by a red ribbon that blocked access to the library.

Mayor Schneider, with the help of Council member Frank Hotchkiss and the requisite pair of giant scissors, cut the ribbon. The children swept inside, adults studded among them. It felt like an Easter egg hunt as the children fanned out. They filtered through the children’s room and went up and down the aisles between new tables and shelving in the main room.

“This library has about 20,000 volumes.” Sarah Rosenblum, the Library Services Director, responsible for all the branches, is navigating from one interview to the next. “The circulation is around 80,000 books a year. Circulation is going up. Not a lot. But this library is focused more on computer usage.” She gestures towards the evenly spaced black monitors paired off one-to-one with someone using the computer. “Because that’s what this community needs.”

They bought $20,000 in new books and DVDs. But they also acquired six new computers, bringing the total internet access count in the main room to twelve. There are also two dedicated word processing machines, also in use, and two dedicated on-line card catalogs.

“People like this library because it’s small and intimate.” Two young boys weave between us and down an aisle. “Well, not like today so much.”

“This library is not as quiet as most,” Irene Macias is also moving between notepads and video cameras. There are a gaggle of teens at the bank of new computers. A girl of two navigates over the arm of the new reading chairs while her mother pulls magazines to look at. Macias is clearly proud of the fact that the Eastside Library is different.

“This library is more of a community gathering place. There are a lot of community meetings in the King center next door. The kids run in here after school lets out. I get lots of compliments from the community that we engage so many kids here. Marivel,” she nods towards branch supervisor Zambrano-Esparza, “knows these kids individually. She loves introducing them to books and reading.”

Library patron, Carolyn Clancy says, “I come here because they have books that Central doesn’t have.” She names one book she comes for often, a Chilton repair manual. “Just don’t say what kind of car it’s for. Otherwise it might be checked out when I need it.”

Other patrons come because the library is compact and the parking is easy and free. Head reference librarian from the Central branch, Jace Turner, says, “Riviera residents come here to pick up their holds.”

But most come because they use the on-line services. Ten minutes after the doors are opened, every computer is in use, most by two or three teens at once. They are scrolling through web pages, playing games, finding interesting music and images, and they’re talking. The talk is not loud, but it is a persistent drone as the children lean over a shoulder, point at a screen, and watch patiently while their friend moves around on a page or clicks through to something else.

One older patron is an island of calm among the computers. He’s got the New York Times open on-line. If he were to run a quick search, he would find the news of the last few years peppered with reports of troubled libraries. If the economy were a mine shaft, libraries would be canaries. The City of Boston held public meetings earlier this week where they discussed the possibility of closing branches. The meetings were well-attended and heated. Closer to home, Montecito branch supervisor Jody Thomas sent out a plea to the community last week for funding help to stay open and retain staff, services, and programs.

But today, the Eastside library is celebrating. Standing in the main room, it looks exactly like a library, but it is behaving like something else, something vital and bustling. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, ‘Reports of the library’s death were exaggerated.’

“Rose Karat was my neighbor,” Elvira Tofoya recalled. Tofoya is the President of the Friends of the Eastside Library. She has been President for 15 years, and has been a member for 20. “Rose had no children, but she loved animals and she told me once she was going to leave her money to animal shelters. I didn’t know she had anything really.”

Karat was born in Poland in 1910. She immigrated to the U. S. as a child with her family, settling in Michigan. She married Joe Karat, born and raised in Michigan, during World War II. They were wed March 18, 1944. After the war, like many thousands of servicemen and their families, the couple moved to Santa Barbara. They purchased a home on North Salinas and lived there until their deaths, Joe in 1986, and Rose in 2001.

Rose grew to know many people in the community. For several decades she ran the quaint Dee Dee Gift Shop at the Miramar Hotel. In later life, she volunteered as an usher at the symphony. She visited the Eastside Library often and chose it as one of the five organizations she left her estate to.

The gift was a boon to the Eastside Library which does not have the same funding options as the other branches. “The Central Library has 500 Friends,” Tofoya says. “The Montecito Library has a strong Friends [organization]. The Eastside Library Friends has 20 members. Dues are $5 to start. That’s like a penny a day.”

The Eastside Friends raise money by selling books that donors have given them. A small room at the library houses the less expensive books, where they are priced at either fifty cents or a dollar. “I sell the more expensive books on Amazon on-line. It brings in $300 or $400 a month.”

Tofoya used to travel to garage sales on Saturday mornings asking people to donate their books. “They can write off the donation on their taxes.” She also used to go door-to-door, to businesses and residences both, asking people in the neighborhood to join the Friends. “They did. But the next year, we mailed them renewals and… nothing. It was flat. People in this community need that personal touch. You can’t just put something in the mail and expect them to respond.”

Tofoya grew up in Texas and spent afternoons under the care of her sister. “I love libraries because my sister loved to dance. On the way to the dance studio, she would drop me off in the library and I would stay for hours. So I’ve just always loved libraries.”

She touches my arm; this is serious. “Libraries are not a band-aid. You can give money to the homeless. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But a library develops the mind. It is the best source of democracy we have. Everyone has access.”

Outside in the patio, paintings line the walls. A tall flamboyant man with flowing dark hair rights a work knocked down by the wind, but when I stop him to talk, he ushers me over to Marylee Guerrero and Yareli Coronel.

“That’s Carlos Cuellar,” they tell me. “He runs the Santa Barbara Arts Alliance. He gives us experience in the arts. He shows us how to do stuff like this,” they gesture at the paintings and photographs, “set up art shows.”

The Alliance has been ensconced in the Franklin Community Center next door to the library for several years, but they have recently been bumped by a remodel underway there. Now they meet in the city’s new teen center at 1235 Chapala.

“Mine’s just called SB,” Guerrero says. Her work, hanging on an exterior wall in the courtyard, is stylized graffiti on canvas, the hard-edged SB tempered with pink handprints and baby’s footprints in red. Guerrero is a junior at Santa Barbara High, entering the school’s Visual Arts and Design Academy (VADA). She hopes to remain in the arts as a career.

Cuellar, hanging on the edge of the conversation to see how his students do with the press, and vice versa, steps up. “We feed a lot of kids to VADA. They teach the kids the art. We teach them the hands-on. Art as a profession. How to speak out. How to show their work.”

Coronel wants to be a police officer. She’s a sophomore at Santa Barbara High. Her piece, ‘You Know’, is an abstract paint spatter set in the display case inside the front door. Cuellar laughs, “Like ‘Which painting?’ ‘Oh, you know, that painting.’”

The next big group project for the Alliance is a pair of murals for the construction walls at the Santa Barbara Airport. “We’ve drawn the panels,” Guerrero explains. “It’s going to show postcards of Santa Barbara – dolphins, the Mission – to welcome people to Santa Barbara.”

Other than bequests like the one from Rose Karat, money is tight for the Santa Barbara Public Library System. Book and DVD purchases are down, hours are reduced, staff has been cut, and services and programs have been minimized. “I was just lucky to have the media pick up my comments,” Jody Thomas, supervisor at the Montecito branch said. “All the branches are struggling.”

Last week, the Montecito Journal printed Thomas’ plea to the community for $175,000 to keep the Montecito branch open and staffed. The Friends of the Montecito Library makes possible the libraries summer children’s programs, all books-on-CD purchases, and two half-time staff members. “This year,” Thomas says, “they’re also buying all the new books.”

Santa Barbara currently operates six libraries. Of these, four are in the County and are operated by the City’s public library system under contract. Each library has a specified district and the County provides $6.90 per resident in each district annually to the regional library. The County libraries the City operates are Carpinteria, Montecito, Goleta and Solvang. Montecito is allotted roughly 12,000 residents. “We split Summerland with Carpinteria.”

Summerland had their own branch several years ago, but the library closed the branch. The Santa Ynez and Los Olivos branches were also closed. Closing outlying branches is one of the first measures library boards must consider when funds get tight. A proposal on the table – one of many to help meet the County’s $39 million budget shortfall – is to reduce the library allotment per resident by 7% to $6.42. The reduction would make hard choices still harder to delay or avoid.

But branch libraries are crucial to the communities they serve. The Eastside branch is perhaps the most striking example in the Santa Barbara system.

The possibility of an Eastside library branch was approved by voters as part of the City’s 1964 General Plan. It was one idea, among many in the plan, that the local community was motivated to support. In the midst of the discussions about the Eastside library, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Mrs. James Belden, school librarian at Monroe Elementary felt the city, and more specifically the Eastside, needed a fitting memorial to the great leader. She suggested a multi-purpose room be added to the nascent library. Land was available on the site, but there were no funds for the addition. Belden successfully raised the required $50,000.

The multi-purpose room was a critical addition to a host of community services that were co-located on a single city block. The library, the community multi-purpose room, a health clinic, and other services were all built on a lot that backed up to Franklin School, a facility that a large segment of the local population would go to either as a student or parent in the normal course of daily life.

The library would be at the center of the community hub.

When the need for the new branch was questioned, Library Trustee Samuel Gerson responded that the existing Santa Barbara library system had “a complex problem, some facets of which have existed for some time and have been aggravated by population pressure and character of population.” In simple terms, Santa Barbara Central Library was getting crowded, and it did not serve Santa Barbara’s Spanish-speaking community. City Council approved the project unanimously on September 2, 1968.

“Each branch reflects their community,” Thomas of the Montecito branch says. “The collections vary depending on the patrons. It also allows a bigger breadth of a collection. Individual branches can specialize.” At the Montecito branch, art books proliferate and there are no music CDs. At the Eastside branch, Spanish-language materials are a focus, and according to Carolyn Clancy, certain car repair manuals which shall remain nameless.

“It used to be that the Central branch had one copy of everything. That’s not the case anymore.” Now patrons use the library’s interbranch request system to get specific books to patrons. That system was expanded in 1986 to encompass a regional network of libraries called the Black Gold Library System. Any patron can go on-line, indentify the book they want at any of seven library systems, and request it to be delivered to the Black Gold library of their choice.

Construction at the Eastside library got underway in early 1969, but even in the flush years of the late 1960s, funding became a problem. The Federal government’s promise to kick in a third of the estimated $144,000 construction cost was hollow. In October, the library trustees announced a six month delay, but in the same breath said they were looking for an “angel” in the community to help them complete the work.

Over a year passed before Santa Barbara County stepped in and allotted funds to finish the project. Construction resumed two years later, and not until four years after ground was broken for the project was the library opened. The library was dedicated May 12, 1973. Focused on the local community from the very beginning, bilingual Margaret Blanchard was the first branch supervisor.

Eastside opened their doors with 40,000 volumes. Of these, 13,000 were children’s books. Today, the Eastside branch has closer to 35,000 volumes. “They’ve done a lot of weeding,” Jace Turner noted. They have also filled in the gap with many DVD titles, addressing the community needs.

Two days before the opening, Sarah Rosenblum worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Marivel Zambrano-Esparza. Thick canvas bags of books are filed away on new shelving. A host of new DVDs are alphabetized in gleaming rows. Plastic wrap is cut from reading chairs, and heavy wooden desk chairs are hauled from storage to stand guard on the new computer stations. The new freestanding shelves where the latest fiction and nonfiction and the shiny new DVDs are displayed look stolid and permanent, but Rosenblum pushes one easily out of place. “They’re on casters. The idea is to make everything flexible. We can push these aside and have a really big space here for a reading or a presentation.”

One box is full of plastic-wrapped Plexiglas shapes. Zambrano-Esparza peels away packing materials and protective coatings and holds the pieces up in different ways. Rosenblum starts to fit them onto wall fittings like you might see in clothing stores, or shoe stores, or …

“Bookstores.” Rosenblum catches my curious gaze. “Libraries are looking more like bookstores.”

“It’s true.” Zambrano-Esparza sets a waterfall shape of Plexiglas aside to be filled later with DVDs. “The trend is to put more out on display. It’s more inviting. People will pick things up and look at them.”

Rosenblum fits a display unit to the wall, “And check them out.”

Join Friends of the Eastside Library. They can be contacted at (805) 963-3727 or c/o Eastside Branch Library, 1102 East Montecito St., Santa Barbara, CA 93103.

Identify the Friends of the Library for your branch.