Closed on Sundays
The theft of time and space in the Bronx that I once cherished.
This is your quick reminder that my debut novel, VICTIM, is available for pre-order. There are also two opportunities to win a free, advanced copy of the novel right now. The first is this giveaway over at Goodreads, and the second is happening here, on the Doubleday Books Instagram page.
This Thanksgiving, I took my family back home to the Bronx. My wife, children, and I stayed in the same apartment building that I spent the first 25 years of my life in. A building where, to this day, I regularly encounter people in the hallways and in the elevator who’ve literally seen me grow up before their eyes and can say, with authority, that they once changed my diaper or babysat me.
While I was back home, I hung out with old friends who shared some devastating news I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
Blaming the migrant crisis and gaps in tax revenue, embroiled New York City Mayor Eric Adams is implementing severe budget cuts across city agencies. As part of those cuts, many libraries in the city, including the one I spent years visiting and writing at in the Bronx, will now be shuttered on Sundays.
I haven’t lived in New York City for the past seven years, and honestly I don’t know a whole lot about Adams or his administration. But I couldn’t believe how stupid the idea was when I heard it.
Not surprisingly, it has been panned by many, including those who argue that the savings the city will get from these cuts is miniscule compared to the forecasted budget deficits.
Nonetheless, this newsletter isn’t about politics and I have no interest in wading into the waters of who or what is to blame for these cuts. Mostly, I’m just sad they’re happening. I’m sad they’re going to rob people of time and space that I once cherished.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that time and space, given that I was just staying in my old apartment in the Bronx. A pre-war apartment, which, by New York City standards these days, is spacious, but which, while growing up there with my mom and my sisters, often felt cramped and noisy to this bookworm.
As a means of finding space for myself, I often spent hours outside of my apartment, hanging out on my block, trying to turn the pavement into my very own sanctuary.
When the Bronx Library Center opened in 2006, it became a safe haven for me that I could reach, on foot, within 10 minutes. As I entered my junior and senior year of high school, I often found myself there on many weekends.
The hulking, modern building felt like a palace I could read in. I didn’t have a desk in my own apartment, but there were plenty of clean ones at the library, which I sat at and studied for the SAT or worked on college and scholarship applications.
After I got into college and began to fashion myself into something of a writer, I spent breaks from campus there on the weekends, too, crafting my first little short stories, working on my MFA applications, doing some more reading.
For a kid like me, a kid who didn’t have his own bedroom until he was a freshman in college, a kid who grew up constantly sharing what little space I had and constantly yearning for more of it, the library became just that.
Space. A clean, safe, and comfortable space for me to run away to. For me to dream in.
I have many fond memories of me walking with purpose down the Grand Concourse with a big book bag on my back full of books and a laptop. Walking past homeboys who looked at me like I was crazy for lugging this shit around, and fly girls who I figured wouldn’t give my nerd ass the time of day.
Often, on these walks, I’d wonder if perhaps I was crazy. Especially on the warmer days, when everyone seemed to be doing the normal thing, enjoying their icees and piraguas, laying up in beach chairs erected in front of their buildings, or orchestrating rides to Orchard Beach.
On the way to the library, I always passed Edgar Allen Poe’s Cottage, which sits, comically, in the middle of Kingsbridge Road. According to the Bronx Historical Society, Poe spent his final three years in the home, living with his dying wife and his mother-in-law.
I often paused there, in the midst of dwelling on how dumb and fucking nerdy I was to be trekking to the library on a weekend, and stared at the house, slathered in bird shit. I wondered what it would be like if Poe actually lived there now. Wondered if we’d be cool.
I felt some sort of literary kinship walking by his crib on my way to the library. In a neighborhood where my declarations to being a writer often fell on deaf or confused ears, it felt nice to have Poe there, to know that his writing space was so close to my own.
My spot was the upper floors of the Bronx Library Center. I’d sit there by the large windows overlooking bustling Fordham Road and spend hours trying to capture some of the people I saw outside on the page.
I shared my space with middle-aged parents studying for tests to get themselves better jobs, recent immigrants trying to learn the language, other ghetto nerds like me reading anime or books they were too afraid to carry out in the open, creeps watching porn, and a fair share of homeless people looking for a comfy chair to nap in.
I felt comfortable amongst these people, which is something I couldn’t say about other libraries I’d frequented. By that point, after all, I’d also spent untold hours at the iconic Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street (another library, coincidentally, whose hours are being cut by the Adams administration).
From age 14 to 17, I worked summers shipping packages and running errands for a non-profit in Midtown. On lunch breaks and during my downtime after work, I’d often head over to the 42nd Street library and bask in the ornate architecture and what seemed like miles of old books.
As beautiful as it all was, though, I always felt a bit out of place. I always felt like I—this dusty, often sweaty, kid from the Bronx with dreams of being a writer of some sort—didn’t belong amongst the crowd of sleek and distinguished Manhattanites.
I never had these reservations in the Bronx Library Center. I only ever felt like I belonged. Like I was amongst my people. Like I was welcome.
I’m not alone either.
I recently listened to an episode of The Kid Mero’s new podcast Victory Light (which you should check out). Mero, formerly of Desus & Mero, and another Bronx ghetto nerd done good, shared his own thoughts on the budget cuts to the library and how much his branch meant to him.
“When I was growing up, you know what I’m saying, my house was always mad crowded, there was always mad people. It was like a two bedroom apartment with 20 motherfuckers in there. So I would go to the library. I would go to the library on Tremont, sit there and do my homework. I didn’t have a computer. If I had to do some shit that needed a computer for school, I had to go there. And bro, that shit was like a safe haven. And the people that worked there, were, like, happy to be there. And they were like, yo, here’s a new book. And they knew you. It was like neighborhood type shit. Like, we come in here and it’s love. We know each other.”
A safe haven, indeed.
To be honest with you all, I had planned to write a whole other post for today. But I scrapped it because I can’t stop thinking about my own safe haven.
I can’t stop thinking about kids in my old neighborhood and others like it in the Bronx, who I just saw. Kids who are probably just like me. Kids who have some sort of dream that might seem weird as fuck to their friends or their family and need a space to go toy with it where no one will look at them funny.
Kids who live in cramped conditions and need space to just think, or breathe. Kids who don’t have great wi-fi, or perhaps don’t even own their own computer. Kids who want to read a book they’ve been excited about, but don’t have the resources to buy it. Kids who want—shit, who need—to interact with a friendly adult that is only interested in feeding their interests.
I’ve been thinking about the parents of these kids, too.
My mom often worried about me whenever I left my apartment in the Bronx—especially as I got older, taller, and brasher. She worried about the people I’d be around, the places I’d be. She worried I’d end up like one of those good kids who’d get written up every week in the newspapers: Wrong place, wrong time, you know the drill.
But she never had to worry about me when I told her I was going to the library. She never had to worry that I wouldn’t be safe. In many ways, the library was a safe haven to her, too. And I’m sure it feels that way to many parents.
While cutting a day of services might not seem like the worst thing in the world to some people—shit, your local library might’ve been closed for years on Sundays, right?—I know full well what this cut really means and who it really affects.
And it pains me to see it happen.
Peace,
Andrew
Recommendations:
Xochitl Gonzalez’s excellent piece interrogating her complicated, and increasingly fractured, relationship to hip-hop music as a woman.
Brandon Taylor, for
, analyzes and deconstructs his old MFA application letter of intent. This was such an interesting exercise, and something that I might try out myself one day.Speaking of college application essays, Carmen Petaccio lays out how the form has infiltrated the life and work of artists. “…each successive stage of an individual’s personal, professional, and/or artistic advancement depends on the fraught composition (and unlikely approval) of some sort of narrativized, self-reflective application essay.”
George Packer on why trying to infuse fiction with activism can taint an entire creative project. “The work stands or falls on the depth, breadth, and vitality of its vision of human truth; ideology narrows and abstracts human truth to fit its messy contingencies inside an impersonal framework.”
Thomas Chatterton Williams on the “Post-Victimhood” art of Chase Hall. “Hall forces us to meet the people he depicts on their own terms, without the usual lens—or crutch—of our inherited, fetishizing, or condescending projections.”