About 400 well-dressed folks walked into Weylin B. Seymour’s (the beautifully lit majestic cathedral of a building across from Baby’s All Right) on Wednesday night to pay lots of money for small plates of food and listen to very important people talk about libraries.
The people were gathered for Brooklyn Public Library’s 19th annual gala which honored Brooklyn innovators. The honorees were Etsy, the Dumbo-based craft marketplace, and First Data CEO Frank Bisignano, who grew up deep in Brooklyn on 59th Street and Avenue N in Mill Basin down by Jamaica Bay. He now runs a Fortune 250 company.
I think it's the purest form of democracy, the purest form of equality.
Much of the talk during the evening was about the good work the library has done and also how it will adapt to a world in which physical books are becoming less ubiquitous.
We had a chance to catch up with Etsy CFO Kristina Salen, who explained how her company utilizes libraries.
“A lot of people think about libraries for books, but it’s so much more than that,” she said. “We’ve used libraries for seller education workshops and craft entrepreneurship meetups. Otherwise it’d be really hard to have that programming. You wouldn’t have the sentiment around education and access. Our sellers generally are women, they tend to be in child-rearing years, and they tend to be using Etsy as a way to augment their income. These are folks for whom access is super important.”
During the cocktail hour I approached two women talking animatedly about literature. When asked why the library remains relevant, Jacqueline Woodson said the importance lies in having a physical place for people to meet.
“People will always need a place to gather. We want to gather around information and content,” she said. Woodson is the winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for her memoir Brown Girls Dreaming. “Gathering has always been a part of the revolution! Can you imagine if Harriet Tubman had a cellphone?”
I replied that I’d imagine she’d have been able to just text everyone.
“Then the FBI would’ve been there waiting for her,” Woodson responded. “You can’t replace a physical gathering spot.”
A point that came up frequently is that the institution of the library plays a role in the democratic ethos of our country.
In a time when public school systems are being broken into charter systems and public transportation is being overtaken by private car companies like Uber and Lyft, there is a bygone feeling of egalitarianism the library offers.
After the speeches, Frank Bisignano talked to me in a small room off to the side of the banquet hall. He was dressed as you’d expect a major CEO to dress, but his accent was straight an unabashedly from the neighborhood.
“To me the BPL is one of the freest services to all. I grew up and my mom ran the house on the envelope system: two dollars in the envelope for the electric bill, three dollars for the heating bill,” Bisignano recalled. “I went to the library as a young boy and did my school projects. Anyone can go in. You can operate there all day long. I think it’s the purest form of democracy, the purest form of equality.”
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