Library Records Trace Lower East Side's Past

Here, in a series of businesslike reports, the Lower East Side of legend breathes again.

The reports were compiled annually by the librarians of the 95-year-old Seward Park branch to let the New York Public Library's central administrators know how better to meet the neighborhood's needs. But in doing so, the librarians' observations -- sometimes in prosaic bureaucratese, sometimes in vivid, tender fashion -- chronicled changes in the neighborhood's ethnic makeup, economics and schooling. Their reports also singled out the books that riveted readers or that reflected solutions residents were seeking to the anxieties of their times.

In a 1920 report, the librarian took admiring note of how the neighborhood's tenement dwellers and sweatshop workers were thirsting for authors like Dickens and Hawthorne, but she also lamented the ''disorderliness, disregard of the rights of others, mental defectives and 'queer' characters on the borderland of sanity, thefts and book mutilations.''

By the Depression, another branch librarian was struggling with ''undesirables'' dozing on radiators, but she was beguiled by the resilience of unemployed men who were searching for books on syrup flavoring and stocking manufacture so they could start their own businesses.

For decades, the librarians struggled to meet the eclectic tastes of the neighborhood's Jews -- even ''Mein Kampf'' was popular in the World War II era -- but by 1971 the chief librarian said she was ''cutting back on the purchase of Jewish materials in order to build up the Chinese,'' and she colorfully expressed the urgency of doing so in an always curious neighborhood.

''The public here lives with their books,'' she wrote. ''This is the branch where a former librarian once found a fried egg in a book.''

These glimpses of the life and times of the Lower East Side as seen through the lens of one of its bedrock institutions were recently unearthed in archives at the main library at 42nd Street. They were collected for the reopening last week of the Seward Park library building, a red-brick and stone palazzo on East Broadway at Jefferson Street that underwent a two-year, $6.3 million renovation.

Other branches could submit similar accounts, but these are about the storied Lower East Side, the embodiment of the melting pot. The reports also reveal much about the moral perspectives of the librarians, whose impressions occasionally betray a note of condescension or worse but for the most part are filled with compassion and amused delight.

The ''liberry,'' as the immigrants called it, functioned as the great educator and entertainer for the masses who made the clamorous streets their first American home. The reports from the 1920's describe how embryonic socialists intoxicated by volumes of Marx crowded next to bearded men bent over Yiddish versions of ''The Last of the Mohicans'' and young working women drinking in Byron and Poe.

The hunger for knowledge and escape is palpable in one librarian's throwaway remark. The library, she said, had wisely decided to stop shelving books the same day they were returned and so ''did away with the restless, tired lines of children that often waited for hours in the hope of getting a better book.''

The reports record necessary data: branch circulation (373,162 in 1921), usage by adults and children, the popularity of foreign versus English books. But they also offer irresistible nuggets, telling for example, how a campaign to improve reference room manners has led ''some of the busiest talkers to make their headquarters elsewhere.''

The 1921 librarian, Esther Johnston, decided to increase the purchase of Western novels ''as an outlet for boys who will find their way soon enough to the realistic and neurotic books so popular on the East Side.'' By 1923, the library found itself disappointing too many readers seeking books popular at the time and so instituted a one-book limit on such volumes.

''Naturally we do not designate the books as 'popular' to the children,'' the librarian wrote. ''One little boy explained the regulation to a friend by saying, 'You may have one book you want and one book you don't want.'''

There are tasty sociological morsels, like the library's recording how prospering Jews were moving to the Bronx and Queens, leaving behind their poorer Orthodox brethren. But there are also some slips of prevailing racial attitudes.

''What is going to happen to the neighborhood, no one will venture to prophesy,'' the 1926 librarian wrote. ''We may become a business district -- we may be invaded by the power Negroes (a few are to be seen now and then); Italians and Poles, forced out of the west side, may come (we have many more Italian children than formerly) or we may find ourselves in the midst of a housing rehabilitation.''

The library struggled through the Depression with smaller staff, shorter hours and the added plague of a spontaneous flea market on its doorstep. But a librarian noted that some ''men, with not a thing in the world to do, have found direction for their lives'' by studying French and Esperanto, reading Scott and Wells.

World War II stirred interest in war novels like ''They Were Expendable'' and ''A Bell for Adano.'' But readers were also grilling librarians, the way they might search Google today, for information on air raid regulations, rationing and ''how a pregnant woman whose husband is in the army gets government aid.'' Toward the end of the war families worried about the psychological problems of their returning veterans were requesting books by psychologist Karen Horney or those bearing titles like ''When Johnny Comes Marching Home.''

For years the neighborhood had been losing its raw immigrant character -- the pushcarts, for example, were disappearing. But the end of the war prompted a librarian's report that said the neighborhood ''has again become a melting pot,'' with a stream of displaced persons who were asking for books in Polish, Hungarian or French and buttonholing the library's three Yiddish-speaking staff members.

One librarian in 1947 captured a dramatic moment: ''When the small boy, waiting for his mother in the Adult department, recognized the ex-soldier who had befriended him in a European concentration camp, there was a very affecting reunion.''

The waning of the 1940's brought Puerto Ricans to the neighborhood and the librarian in 1951 lamented that while the enthusiasm of the children was forcing the library to buy Spanish titles, the adults do not ''find their way to the library.''

''Most of them are young people busy with home and babies, trying to adjust where adjustment is particularly difficult; a new language; a large and bewildering city, especially since they come from rural communities; laws and regulations which seem purposely bent on plaguing them,'' the librarian wrote.

By the mid-1960's, the chief librarian was asking for a young adult librarian to cater to the black and Puerto Rican teenagers filling the new housing projects. In 1971, the librarian described the increasing numbers of Chinese youngsters in the reference room as ''the most methodical and thorough little researchers.'' But there were forces beyond ethnicity shaping the library. The branch librarian in the late 1970's bemoaned shorter hours, staff losses and sagging morale generated by the city's fiscal crisis.

The reports are laced with timeless themes. By midcentury, circulation seemed to be declining and the 1951 librarian seemed to have a prescient suspicion why.

''Is the next cause the much blamed television?'' she wondered. ''Certainly there are great tangles of aerials on every roof.''

Even in the prosperous 1950's, the neighborhood's elderly residents -- one librarian describes them as ''old men sitters'' -- were using the library for ''shelter.'' While librarians could simply ask them to leave, one librarian wrote, ''it cannot be done without causing a usually loud and angry response from the removee.''

Whatever their country, fresh immigrants sought out the library like a life raft. The 1998 librarian, Susan Singer, noted how immigrants from China's Fukien province ''are escorted in by relatives to apply for a library card only days after arriving in the United States.''

That fervor is still apparent today. On a recent afternoon, three dozen children of Chinese ethnicity sat reading books like ''Stan the Hot Dog Man,'' doing homework, or playing games on 30 new computers. Xiu Ming Liu, one of a loose-knit group of caretaking grandmothers, said the children virtually inhabit the library after school because they live in cramped apartments with brothers and sisters who distract them.

Mary Jones, the current branch librarian and herself an immigrant (from County Roscommon, Ireland), said that while adults crave best sellers like ''The Da Vinci Code,'' books in Chinese also fly from the shelves. The bookcases in the Chinese language section were almost bare.

But she also pointed to another bookcase that captured an era's passing. The library's Yiddish and Hebrew collection was reduced to three forlorn shelves, and almost all the books were still there.