Lenox Library leaders debate land sale
LENOX -- The cupola that once crowned the library here sits in the small reading park adjacent to the 192-year-old Greek revival building. Still wearing the wings attached during a fund-raising campaign to help the cupola "fly" back to the roof, it has become a symbol of the financial woes that have enmeshed the privately owned library and this bucolic Berkshires town in a controversy about the library's place in the community.
The rotting beams supporting the cupola were among the surprises the library encountered after it started renovations in 2002 of an interior plagued by weeping walls, peeling ceilings, and pigeon guano 4 feet deep in the attic. Bathrooms lacked hot water. A dropped ceiling concealed an old rotunda with hand-painted vines. A balcony housing nonfiction books rested on the fiction shelves below it. When the library reopened in 2004, the project had taken twice as long as anticipated and, at $3.8 million, cost three times as much.
Not only did the library need funds to reattach the cupola, but it also foresaw foreclosure. So the nonprofit Lenox Library Association arranged last fall to sell the half-acre Roche Reading Park for $700,000 to a real estate broker who wanted to erect offices and housing on the modest parcel bounded by a chain-link fence.
When news of the deal broke in November, 700 residents signed a petition protesting it. Two-hundred crowded the main reading room for a heated forum. A Save the Library Committee formed, headed by one woman who retired here after vacationing at Canyon Ranch and another who remembers searching the shelves as a girl for D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" only to learn it was hidden behind the circulation desk.
Selectmen devised a plan to buy both the park and library for $1.6 million and to let the library association continue to run it. The proposal goes before Town Meeting in May. Winning the required two-thirds vote is expected to be tough at a time when the fire department needs a new truck and the water system requires work.
"It's a lovely library. Some people call it the Rolls Royce of libraries in the Berkshires," said Carole Schwimmer, 71, cochair of the Save the Library Committee. Schwimmer, formerly of Long Island, is no stranger to community activism, having participated in the protests that forced JFK Airport to limit supersonic jets in the 1970s. "We want the park saved and the library saved, and we want the town to give fair market value and no more."
"This is one of the last pieces on Main Street that's green," said Joseph Nolan, 75, a committee member and former selectman. "People took it for granted that the library was there and was always going to be there."
Adding to the library controversy was word that the board had sold $213,010 worth of materials from its collection, including two letters from Abraham Lincoln and one from Thomas Jefferson. The Lincoln letters, which sold for $25,000 and $28,000 and concerned his son's attendance at Harvard, were found, by chance, in a storage room. A bound copy of Edwin Hale Lincoln's "Wildflowers of New England" fetched $60,000.
To the library, the sale was self-preservation. "They're items we'd been given in various boxes over time," said library association president Marianne Deignan Ellrodt, 45. "They were not relevant to this area." In the 1980s, the library sold a set of Audubon prints and a Saint-Gaudens bas - relief to finance a new roof and preserve services.
Of 348 community libraries in the state, the Board of Library Commissioners estimates all but 60 are municipal departments. The Lenox Library Association annually raises almost $300,000 for operating expenses and receives another $242,000 from the town. Each board member contributes or raises $5,000 a year.
"The library just didn't have the money to do the kind of ongoing capital projects you need to do on a building this age," said executive director Denis Lesieur. "The library had outgrown the existing space. We were literally getting rid of a book every time we added one."
The library's problem paying a $2 million letter of credit from
Kevin Sprague, 40, still feels "a vague sense of privilege" whenever he walks into a main reading room he once considered reserved for adults. "This town has enjoyed the benefits of a free public library without having to pay for it for 100-plus years," said Sprague . "It's been fundamentally subsidized by the generosity of a small number of people. We're coming up against the limits of that reality."
The plan to sell the park emerged in negotiations with the bank last year. The selectmen's rescue plan, which stops short of a town takeover, emerged because of fears the library could not maintain its fund-raising as a municipal department. The cupola will be reinstalled by June, thanks to a state grant. Payments for a bond to buy the library and park would run roughly $100,000 a year.
"There are people who say, 'Why does the library surpass everyone else?' " said Robert Akroyd, 43, chairman of the selectmen. "By not doing anything or putting them to the back of the line, we run the risk that the library loses its assets to an outside entity."
Few condone selling the park, but an informal poll found only half support the proposed bailout. Some question taking over an old building in need of brick and chimney work while only three municipal representatives are on the library's 22-seat board. Some doubt the library can maintain its fund-raising and contend it should be a town department. Some suggest the library cut expenses so the town could buy the properties without increasing its annual spending.
Selectmen unanimously approved the plan, but state Representative Smitty Pignatelli hesitates. "We need to make sure that if the managers of the library are going to continue to run the library this won't happen again," he said. "That's what I don't think they have convinced people of yet. They haven't convinced me." 