It’s a quarter to 9 at the Portage-Cragin branch of the Chicago Public Library, and Sonya Dwyer calls out, “The library will be closing in 15 minutes. Last opportunity to check out any books.”
She gets no takers.
The only patron left in the spacious main room is an elderly man who has been poring over Polish-language books for the past hour. He stands up, puts his hat on and heads out the door. Dwyer and the library’s other pages go back to their work of reshelving books. The reference librarians and clerks still on duty begin to gather around the front desk, filling out the last few forms, making a final note on a calendar.
In one half of the library’s auditorium, two deputy registrars from the Chicago Board of Elections are packing up their supplies after a 12-hour day of registering voters for the upcoming city election.
On the other side of a divider, four members of the Great Books group, a weekly institution at the branch for a quarter century, are oblivious to the ticking of the clock. They remain deep in their discussion of Leo Tolstoy’s short story “After the Ball.”
The library is quiet, calm and still. Books are in their places. Magazines are carefully stacked. The table tops are empty. At this moment, the branch seems a shrine to the written word, a sacred repository for the wisdom of a civilization. There is a hush here, as if in a museum.
But the stillness is deceiving.
It comes at the end of a routinely hectic day in the life of the Portage-Cragin branch, and it belies the neighborhood life that has pulsed through the building over the last 12 hours.
Far from being a mausoleum, this branch-like the other branch libraries throughout the city, like libraries in the suburbs-is a community crossroads.
Here, young mothers find picture books for their toddlers. Old men read the financial papers. In the branch’s computer room, an out-of-work clerk
drafts her resume. At one of the tables, a carpenter fills out income-tax forms for his ex-wife.
Here, a 6th-grader finds reference books for a school project on the Renaissance, or help in locating those reference books. A woman with all her belongings in a gym bag stops in to get warm. Teenage girls ogle teenage boys, and vice versa. Book lovers come for the books they love.
And far from being quiet, the library branch is most often filled with a wall-to-wall buzz of sound. Books are dropped, pages are turned, whispered conversations take place. The photocopy machine runs. Carry-all bags are plopped onto tables. Children giggle. A reference librarian tries to help a middle-age woman track down a book called “Relationships,” the author of which she has forgotten. A young boy talks to himself as he hunts for a book on the shelves. A baby cries.
But at the end of this day, all is quiet. Just as it was when the day started 12 hours earlier.
The day begins
The Portage-Cragin branch is a long, low, uninvitingly boxish-looking building in the middle of the 5100 block of busy Belmont Avenue. Across the street is another neighborhood center, the Jewel Food Store. A half block to the east is still another, Foreman High School.
At 9 a.m. this day, when the branch opened, Bob Beghin was at the front door waiting to get in.
While from the outside the library appears stark, inside it has a pleasant, airy feeling. The same architect who gave the branch its flat, windowless, outer brick walls created a main library space that is roomy yet cozy, especially when it’s dolled up, as it always is, with colorful signs, pictures and even dolls hanging from the ceiling.
Beghin found a table and put his backpack on a chair. He took off his jacket, but as he browsed for something to read, he kept his knit cap on.
Beghin, 44 and between jobs, had come to the library to kill time. He settled on a book titled “Home Sausage Making,” sat down at a table and began to read.
“This just caught my attention,” he said. “I read damn near anything: Westerns, mysteries, anything. I moved back to the neighborhood 12 years ago from out of state, and one of the first things I did was get a library card.”
At one time, Beghin was looking for a particular book on dog training, and the Portage-Cragin librarians found it at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and had it sent up to Chicago so he could read it.
“If you know how to use the library, you have a world of information at your fingertips,” Beghin said. “It’s better than an American Express card.”
As Beghin paged through the sausage-making book (“I don’t know why I started reading this; I’m hungry now”), Evelyn Kolec and Carol Pustola were in the auditorium setting up voter-registration forms on a line of long tables.
It was the final day to register in precinct polling places (the Portage-Cragin branch is the neighborhood voting site), and the two women weren’t sure what to expect. On the previous day, they’d garnered only two or three registrations. But four years earlier, on the final registration day before the city election, the story had been much different.
“Last time, we were stormed,” Kolec said. “It was after suppertime. There were lines up to the door.”
More than 400 voters, many attracted by Kolec’s ability to speak Polish, were registered that night. “I was writing so much,” Pustola said, “my wrist has never healed.”
The library’s neighborhood
The neighborhood served by the Portage-Cragin branch-bounded by Fullerton Avenue, Pulaski Road, Irving Park Road and Major Avenue-is an ethnically diverse community of 70,000 people, with a strong commercial strip along Belmont where multilingual signs, such as the one at the nearby Insty-Prints store (“Mowimy Po Polski-Se Habla Espanol-We Even Speak English”) are common.
Although the 1990 census found few blacks or Asians, some 15,000 residents described themselves as Hispanics, including Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Colombians, and 20,000 or so more listed their ancestry as Polish. In the intervening five years, those numbers have continued to increase as Latinos have moved in from communities to the east, such as Humboldt Park, and waves of new immigrants have arrived from Poland under new, more lenient immigration rules.
The Portage-Cragin branch has more than 700 Spanish-language books. But even more impressive is the library’s Polish-language collection of more than 4,000 volumes, bought with a $158,000 federal grant awarded through the Illinois State Library.
Those volumes include history books, art books, reference works, science texts, children’s books and adult fiction, ranging from classics to best-sellers, many originally written in English.
One shelf, for example, has “Czerwony Sztorm,” which is the Polish translation of Tom Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising.” On another is “Magazyn Osobliwosci” by Karol Dickens (“The Old Curiosity Shop” by Charles Dickens).
By 10:30 a.m., the noise level in the library was starting to rise.
First, a group of 21 students from the Chicago Christian Academy, an elementary school, arrived with two teachers to do research on birds. Then, from next door, came several dozen mentally and physically disabled students, some in wheelchairs, from the North Center for Handicapped Children.
After doing his research on birds, 7-year-old Julio Santana III sat down at one of the branch’s circulation terminals to try to track down some books in the popular Boxcar Children series, with the assistance of Carol Tarsitano, the head librarian at Portage-Cragin.
“You always have to tell the computer what to do,” Tarsitano explained.
As some of his classmates crowded around him, Julio punched up “The Yellow House Mystery” and read the message out loud, “No copies owned by this branch.”
Another boy, attracted by the crowd, asked Tarsitano, “What are they doing? Playing a game?”
Children weren’t the only ones needing assistance. Karen Hill, a 46-year-old beautician and part-time laundromat operator, went to the front desk and said, “There’s a book out I want by Koontz, but I can’t think of the name of it.”
A reference librarian scrolled quickly through the circulation records to help Hill figure out that the book she wanted by Dean Koontz is “Door to December.” Unfortunately, Portage-Cragin’s two copies were out.
“I’ve been looking for that book for three or four months,” Hill said.
Hill used to buy books, but that got too expensive. Now, she comes to the library twice a month and usually takes out a couple of books.
“Reading relaxes me,” she said as she looked through the newly arrived books. “It gets me out of my everyday life, and it’s the cheapest form of entertainment.”
After a few minutes of browsing, Hill settled on “What I Lived For,” by Joyce Carol Oates, and “Praying for Sleep,” by Jeffrey Deaver, and headed for the front desk to check them out.
A babbling baby
By 1:30 p.m., the women in the auditorium had registered 18 voters, and there was a steady hum in the library’s main room, even though the children’s section was, for the moment, empty.
One part of the hum was the happy babbling of 5-month-old Michael Sebastian Jones in his car seat on a table where his mother, Jeannette, 19, was working on two school papers.
“For a business course, I have to do a term paper on the sale of Dominick’s. I’m researching the reasons and how it’s going to affect our economy,” said Jones, a freshman at nearby Wright College. “For a speech course, I have to write an informational speech, and I was thinking of doing it on myths, folklore and stuff like that.”
In front of her she had books on mythology by Joseph Campbell and Edith Hamilton. But she also had a few other books: one, for her husband, was a handbook for studying for the high-school equivalency test; the other, for her, was a diet book titled “The Last Five Pounds.”
By 2:30 p.m., schoolchildren had begun to arrive from Foreman and the 15 elementary schools served by Portage-Cragin, and the sound level in the library started to ratchet up.
For the next five hours, the young report-writers, fact-checkers and literary critics filled the children’s section and overflowed into the adult area. They kept reference librarians busy with questions, and the clerks busy checking books in and out.
Nine-year-old Bartlomiej Wisniewski, newly arrived from Poland, needed information on Washington state while his sister Izabela, 11, had to do a report on Casimir Pulaski, the Polish military hero who died in 1779 while serving in the Revolutionary War forces of George Washington.
`Maggots and everything’
At another table, 14-year-old Joe McDow, an 8th grader at Schubert Elementary School, explained, “We have to do a report about a science guy who wrote about-What do you call it?-flies laying eggs on a garbage can lid and you get maggots and everything.”
For his one-page report, Joe was copying out a wordy section from the Dictionary of National Biography, Volume XIV, on scientist John Needham.
Armando Jacquez, 20, and his brother Jose, 18, were at the branch to take out study guides for the U.S. citizenship test, not for themselves-they were born in this country-but for their parents.
The elder Jacquezes had lived in the U.S. more than 20 years, but they’d always held out the hope of moving back to their native Mexico-until the recent economic problems in that nation. “The way it’s working out, it doesn’t look like there’s any future there,” said Armando, a sophomore at Triton College in River Grove.
Armando knew to look for the citizenship books in the Portage-Cragin branch because he’d used them three years ago when he had to do a report while at Prosser High School.
By 7:30 p.m., the buzz in the library had started to abate, and now, in the final minutes, the room is silent.
After a brisk but not overwhelming day, Evelyn Kolec and Carol Pustola have registered 68 new voters. With their bags and boxes, they head out the door while reference librarian Susan Jorgensen goes into the other side of the auditorium to tell the Great Books group they have to finish up.
Ed Waytula, a member of the Great Books group almost since its inception, stops to browse for a moment at the paperback rack near the front door.
He grew up across the street from the Hamlin Park branch library during the Depression, and he loved being able to see popular magazines and books there without having to pay for them.
After a lifetime of reading, he says, “I’d be lost without a library.”
He walks out into the night.
