Fully renovated Capitol View Library strengthens Ward 7 community

Until the 1960s, the library offerings in Southeast DC’s Marshall Heights and Capitol View neighborhoods were limited to just two bookmobiles. In 1965, neighbors won a 10-year battle to build a DC Public Library branch in their area, but over time the facility grew stale and Ward 7 frustrations mounted as area residents saw fully renovated libraries opening elsewhere. With that history as a backdrop and with another lobbying campaign for the library behind them, the community joined with city officials last month for a day of festivities to celebrate the complete renovation of the Capitol View Neighborhood Library, located at 5001 Central Ave. SE.

Residents, seeing crime increase each summer in the 1960s, advocated for the branch to provide opportunities for learning and community engagement, noted Keith Towery, chair of the Marshall Heights Civic Association. “Ever since the library opened, it’s been a focal point in the community,” he said in an interview. “We do a lot of events here.”

The Capitol View branch’s program calendar for its brand-new space includes crochet lessons, midday movies, youth story times and digital literacy workshops. The Marshall Heights Civic Association will hold its next monthly meeting there on Saturday, May 4.

About 150 people celebrated the reopening on March 23, listening to live local music, viewing work by DC artists, and enjoying a story time led by Mayor Muriel Bowser. The reopening marked completion of a two-phase, $7.2 million interior and exterior renovation that included a new facade, new windows and an expanded plaza. Bowser has also proposed another $1 million in the fiscal year 2020 budget for further upgrades.

“DCPL took the time to really listen to what the community wanted,” Towery stated.

Community was the focus throughout the ribbon-cutting ceremony, which included honoring the late Roshaunda Jenkins, a Zumba instructor and integrative nutritionist at the library. Jenkins, a big part of the fundraising efforts for the library, died of breast cancer last summer. Breast Care for Washington established a memorial fund in her name for uninsured patients.

Ward 8 resident and artist Sheila Crider contributed “Big Island Vacation,” a colorful work of art in the children’s section. Crider, who was born and raised in Ward 8, told The DC Line that she hopes her piece, inspired by a vacation she took to Hawaii, serves as a “point of departure for the imagination and where it can take you.” Crider also connected her craft of quilting to the theme of “communities coming together.”

In the fall of 2016, Capitol View resident Francel Trotter Bellinger started making a quilt for the Capitol View branch that incorporates remarks from children about why they love the library (quotes like “The library is a safe place to let my imagination fly free” and “I like when it’s quiet,” East of the River reported). Nearly 60 years ago, when she was just 10 years old, Trotter Bellinger asked the U.S. Senate to build a library in her neighborhood. In her testimony, she read from a letter she had written that said, “If we read more, we might become teachers, doctors, chemists or other useful men and women.”

In an interview with The DC Line, Trotter Bellinger was modest about her speech to a room full of senators. “It was a result of our civic association and my mom,” she said. Her commitment to the library has been unwavering. “I was involved in the library ever since then,” Trotter shared. “It’s just kind of been my library.”

She will be teaching a children’s quilting class at the library to preserve the tradition. “It’s not something that kids do anymore,” Trotter Bellinger explained. “I’d like to keep that artform going, and I’ve got neighbors’ kids that want to learn.”

Today, residents won’t just be reading in the library, with much having changed in library science since Trotter Bellinger’s 1961 congressional testimony — they will also be using digital resources. When designing new spaces, DCPL works to “customize our modernizations for the communities that they serve,” DCPL executive director Richard Reyes-Gavilan said in an interview with The DC Line. The Marshall Heights-Capitol View area, in particular, needed computers and better broadband access, he said, so DCPL installed more computers at Capitol View than it has at other libraries in the city. There are public-access computers as well as a computer lab with another 12 for digital-literacy training.

Bowser praised Reyes-Gavilan during her remarks at the reopening for his “outstanding vision for how you move bricks-and-mortar libraries, books, and computer and online offerings and take it to the next level that our community needs.” That includes, the mayor said, knowing how to “connect with the rest of the world and jobs and health and make sure — because these libraries are in every one of our communities — that people are connected to government services.”

Other features in the renovated library include updated lighting and furniture, as well as new heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Windows were expanded to reach from the floor to the ceiling. The facade, landscaping, fencing and front plaza were upgraded. The building also qualifies for LEED Gold certification for its environmentally friendly design and dedicates more of its space to services for children and teenagers. The U.S. Green Building Council is currently reviewing the LEED certification.

Trotter Bellinger shared with The DC Line that she is especially pleased with the library’s sign outside. “It lights up at night. It’s absolutely awesome. It has turned that corner into a whole different corner.”

“Originally, we had been funded for sort of a modest interior renovation,” Reyes-Gavilan said in an interview with The DC Line. “But because of community advocacy and support from the mayor and the city council, more money eventually came in to the project so we could do this facade exterior improvement as well as the window expansion.”

Reyes-Gavilan also said that he thinks featuring artwork by local artists “fills the community with a lot of pride.” He pointed out interesting shapes and vibrant colors throughout the interior design, stating that “everything about this building really speaks to how exciting libraries are and what great destinations for community education and learning and recreation” they are.

The Capitol View branch’s renovations are part of a “renaissance of the District’s libraries,” according to the mayor’s press release for the March 23 ceremony. Across the city, modernization projects at 22 branches, including the Capitol View Neighborhood Library, are either finished, in progress or funded; with last month’s event, work is now complete in all seven branches east of the Anacostia River. “In 15 years, the District was able to accomplish what it takes many cities decades to complete,” according to the release.

Ward 7 DC Council member Vincent Gray spoke to the audience about his history with library advocacy since 2005, when constituents raised concerns about renovation plans for the Anacostia Neighborhood Library (now in Ward 8, the branch and the surrounding area were in Ward 7 prior to the 2012 redistricting). “We set out on a journey at that point to be able to do something about that library and then try to create a vision for other libraries in Ward 7,” he said.

The greater DC library renaissance continues with renovation on tap for several more neighborhood libraries, as well as modernization of downtown’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, which is designed to be a “great place to meet a friend for coffee,” according to the DCPL Twitter account. Set for completion in the fall of 2020, the MLK renovation includes community engagement initiatives like a call by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities earlier this year for local artists to design the vestibule.

For the Capitol View branch, Reyes-Gavilan said, library officials worked with the arts commission to procure a sculpture by Italian-American artist Davide Prete, an art and humanities professor at the University of the District of Columbia. According to the university’s website, Prete and his students will create a sculpture called “Freedom to Read” that will be placed in the exterior front plaza of the building. DCPL invited the public to submit ideas for inspirational words to add to this artwork, and the community will soon get a chance to vote for their favorites.

When asked about a discrimination lawsuit filed against DC in connection with the Capitol View Neighborhood Library renovation that was dismissed in the fall, Reyes-Gavilan focused on the positive. “The community was very, very adamant about getting more funding into this project, and as far as I’m concerned all’s well that ends well,” he said.

The lawsuit filed by the Marshall Heights Civic Association, the SE-NE Friends of the Capitol View Library and two individual plaintiffs alleged racial and socioeconomic discrimination in the city’s allocation of resources for the renovation of the Capitol View Neighborhood Library, citing a budget that was scaled back from initial estimates and the decision to break the project into two phases. An early recommendation envisioned $22 milion for a full renovation or rebuild, along the lines of the project that created an all-new Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library in predominantly white Ward 3.

In dismissing the suit on Oct. 22, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy J. Kelly cited a variety of procedural grounds and said the plaintiffs had not proved that the allocation of resources was evidence of intentional racial discrimination rather than legitimate differences in the buildings, such as size, proximity to other library branches and the scope of the circulating collection. The judge also cited projects of a scale similar to Cleveland Park in two areas of Ward 5, which is predominately African-American, and noted that the final budget was comparable to the amount spent on renovations to the Palisades Neighborhood Library in Ward 3.

“It is certainly unfortunate that, in Plaintiffs’ view, District officials have failed to adequately respond to their needs and broken promises to their neighborhood,” he wrote in the 39-page decision. “But nothing Plaintiffs describe goes beyond the dissatisfaction that many citizens experience when advocating for local public-works projects. Such routine frustrations, without more, do not permit an inference of racial discrimination.”

With the completion of the exterior renovations — which got underway after the building’s temporary closure last September — even those who took the District to court are by and large satisfied with the resources ultimately devoted to the renovation of the Capitol View Neighborhood Library.

“We lost the lawsuit in the court, but we actually ended up with everything that we were asking for in the lawsuit,” said Trotter Bellinger, one of the plaintiffs. “So I’ve got no complaints.”