Camden library's closure will create a void

By any measure, the downtown Camden library is a forlorn repository of books.

The main floor is as dimly lit as a cocktail lounge, a chunk of the second-floor ceiling has caved in, half the bathrooms are out of order, and the librarians can't remember buying a book for at least 18 months.

The columned Federal Street branch will close for good at 8 p.m. Thursday, when the city's library system officially ends.

Its only other library - more than two miles south, on Ferry Avenue - will also close, but will reopen at 10 a.m. Monday under the auspices of the Camden County library system.

Rutgers University is looking for an area in the lower level of its Paul Robeson Library, at Third and Cooper Streets, to accommodate former Federal Street patrons, but no budget, space, or opening date has been specified.

In the meantime, frequent patrons will feel the loss keenly - and books are the least of it.

Reference librarian Jon Parker said he worried about regulars such as Ronaldo Betancourt, a soft-spoken, middle-aged man who visits to look up addresses for embassies all over the world to write letters about global politics.

"He always thinks that his opinion counts," Parker said. When the library closes, "it's people like Mr. B. that are going to be cheated."

Competition for the library's 16 public computers is fierce, often with a line forming before the 9 a.m. opening.

On a recent afternoon, most of the teenagers and adults at the terminals were not playing games but doing homework or searching for jobs and housing. Almost all said they had no Internet service at home.

"People here can't afford computers," said Curtis Williams, 35, a South Camden resident who said he did odd jobs but visited the library every one of the four days a week it was open.

Frankie Matos, a senior library assistant and computer manager who has worked at this branch for 22 years, not only makes sure the machines are working but also has made dozens of house calls to help patrons with their computers when he's off the clock.

"People will tell me, 'I've been having this problem with a computer at home. That's why I'm using this one,' " he said.

After he reinstalls software or removes a virus, they may give him a few dollars if they can afford it, Matos said. "Or sometimes they'll bring me lunch to say thank you."

Matos, one of 19 library staff members, said he would lose his $26,000-a-year position when the library closed; few of them applied for the handful of Ferry Avenue openings because most are part time.

The Federal Street library draws about 100,000 visits a year, said director Jerome Szpila, who on Wednesday was named manager of the Ferry Avenue library and the proposed Rutgers facility.

Szpila said he had been less concerned about his inability to stock new titles than about the disappearance of a facility that had become a community center in this beleaguered city.

"People in these kinds of areas," he said, "use libraries differently than people in middle-class communities. For people here in downtown Camden, it's a safe place to read a book, play chess, use the Internet."

"Especially with high unemployment, libraries are becoming places where you can spend some time without having to buy something. And for a lot of people, that's a pleasure."

Some patrons were unaware of the imminent loss. "I knew about the police but not the library closing," medical assistant Wynette Miller said last week. She had been taking her three children regularly to the brightly colored children's department and lives in the Fairview section of Camden, where a small neighborhood library closed in September.

James Marshall, who got library cards for two Camden children he mentors as part of his job with a social-services agency, said he worried that there would be even less for city children to do. "I'm trying to provide some kind of recreational activity for my mentees that enhances what they're doing in school," he said.

By the front window, where about a dozen men have played chess daily at decibel levels higher than most libraries would allow, Virtua Security guard Frank Lee was trying to understand.

"I know times is hard and it's a budget thing," he said, "and I don't blame the mayor. It's just sad that the library has to be one of the casualties of politics - not to mention the people that work here losing their jobs."

Kharis Ndukwe of South Camden, hunched over a copy of O Magazine bearing the headline "Live your best life," described her love of the library this way: "I finish my chores, and I come down here and find me a nice, comfortable chair, and I read. I can even put up with the chess people. I just come here to get my read on."

Szpila has been captivated by the bits of history that he keeps discovering in the building, which opened in 1829 as Camden's first City Hall and courthouse and became a library in 1987.

When he arrived in April, he said, "I found a 1935 RCA Victor repair manual in my office just sitting there." On Tuesday, when county library system staffers were picking up computers and boxes of historical documents from the Federal Street collection, they found an unexpected treasure in the basement: a dusty two-volume set, from 1876, that catalogs every New Jersey soldier who fought in the Civil War.

For his patrons, Szpila said, the prospect of a much smaller library space on the Rutgers campus is small comfort.

"To people who come here now," he said, "this business of Rutgers six months from now is like it's never going to happen . . . pie in the sky. They say they'll believe it when they see it."