BY JACKSON CHEN | Community Board 6’s Parks, Landmarks & Cultural Affairs Committee is looking into creating a few Little Free Library outposts throughout its East Side district in efforts to encourage people to read and share books.
Little Free Library began in Wisconsin in 2009 and has since evolved into a nonprofit with its compact, birdhouse-esque bookshelves found throughout the country. The “take a book, return a book” mantra has already broken into the city, with quaint offerings in Lower Manhattan, Chelsea, the Upper East Side, and East Harlem.
With a lack of Little Free Library locations in the Midtown East area, the board’s parks committee began looking into the possibility after a resident brought the idea up during a meeting more than a year ago, according to Mark Thompson, the committee’s chair.
“The minute it was brought up, we all loved it,” Thompson recalled. “It’s got this really great vibe, and we’ve been talking about it ever since.”
During its September 6 meeting, the parks committee formed a working group to make tangible steps toward introducing a Little Free Library in the area. As of now, the committee is still looking for possible site locations and community organizations that would sponsor and maintain the structure.
In the meantime, the community board is in the process of completing its 2016 Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) report that Thompson said would help identify feasible locations based on the 77 POPS in the district. The chair added that the report would likely be complete within a month.
Outside of possible POPS, the committee is also considering approaching the Department of Parks and Recreation for possible locations, like the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on East 47th Street between First and Second Avenues. Working with the parks department, however, may prove to involve more red tape and regulations than partnering with a privately owned space or a coffee shop, Thompson said.
As for the Little Free Library that was recently installed inside Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem, that resulted from an already established working relationship between Friends of Thomas Jefferson Park and the parks department that led to a smooth launch.
According to Marie Winfield, the founder of the Friends group and vice chair of Community Board 11’s Environment, Open Space & Parks Committee, the department’s district manager for the area was already familiar with Little Free Library because of other such installations. The only cumbersome part of their efforts, Winfield said, was scheduling a day for the parks department to put the lending bookshelf in place.
“It was just a matter of being able to schedule a time for installation,” Winfield said. “Once we got our date, we just got it installed and it’s been operational ever since.”
Since the Little Free Library was just introduced in July, Winfield said, the Friends group, which is in charge of maintenance, is still at the stage where it must often refill the empty stand.
“We go by to check on it and encourage community members to give donations,” Winfield said. “Ours is right next to a children’s playground so we encourage not just older books, but children’s books.”
CB6 members believe that the district’s commercial and residential mix is conducive to introducing the Little Free Library concept. Private businesses may be willing to host one, but the area is also full of quiet residential pockets where there are no shortage of community groups that could well be willing to sponsor the district’s first outpost.
“The community is very supportive of our libraries and education,” Thompson said. “[The Little Free Library] fit into our idea of doing whatever we can to help libraries and encourage people to read.”
