Vol 8 # 6  March 15, 2024

March Meeting Report of Feasibility Study

Layout Options for New Library Branch

The latest public meetings (March 13th at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School and

March 14 online) took comments fthrom over 50 community members on preliminary design concepts for a new branch library at the former Child Development Center (CDC) site next door.

HY Architects summarized their work for the Oakland Library Department’s Feasibility Study, analyzing the existing library portable building and the CDC site, and listing the “wish list” expressed at the community meetings on January 23rd. For discussion, these inputs were translated into 4 layout possibilities:

These layouts focused on the organization of interior space but the architects acknowledged that they had also received many comments about uses for the exterior parts of the site including sitting, play, and gardens or planters. At this stage they haven’t worked on the exterior appearance of the building.

Meeting attendees appreciated the work that has gone into the study so far, and raised questions and concerns such as:

·        A kitchen that could be used by the school as well as library-sponsored programs

·        Construction impacts – estimated to be similar for all options, taking about 18 months)

·        Costs and timeline for initiating the project – remodeling the existing building would cost less than new construction but construction costs aren’t covered in the existing city budget for Capital Projects; a financing consultant will be brought on board for the final report.



Next steps:

HY Architects will provide their slide presentation on the Web and check with the City’s project managers about whether to make the Zoom recording available – when available we will post links on the Friends' website. 

Meetings: Wednesday, May 1, in-person (Piedmont Avenue Elementary School, 4314 Piedmont Avenue)/Thursday, May 2, online (6-7:30 pm both days).

May 1 will mark the end of formal community input. The consultant team will determine a final design proposal that fits the community consensus and use that to prepare more detailed cost estimates and funding ideas. Friends of PAL will try to get an in-person update from library staff before the planned submittal of the final feasibility study report to City Council in the summer.

Read More & Get Involved

Community members who didn’t attend previous meetings can read more detailed summaries at the Friends’ website at www.friendsofpal.org/campaign/ as well as background on the former CDC and the agreement between the City and School District. If you or anyone you know is interested in volunteering or being added to our email list for further updates, please let us know at contact@FriendsofPAL.org

From Sabah Abdulla, Branch Manager

Scheduled Programs

 Storytime is back! Starting March 26 every Tuesday, 10:15 – 10:35 am. Families are welcome to stay after Storytime for Stay & Play with fun and appropriate toys. 

Knit & Crochet with Susan Segal, Monday, March 25 & April 8, 11 am – 1 pm.

Join us every second and fourth Monday of the month for a delightful early afternoon of yarn, needles, and good company at our Adult Knitting & Crochet Circle! Settle into a warm and inviting space where creativity and conversation intertwine. Everyone is welcome!

Teen Pop-Up Crafts, Tuesday, March 26, 4:30 – 5:30 pm.

Join us every third Tuesday to hang out and get creative.

Storyteller Kirk Waller, Saturday, March 30, 2 - 2:45 pm.

With a lifelong love of story, literature, and the performing arts, Kirk Waller has been immersed in these art forms for over 20 years. He summons all his talents and masterfully fuses them together with spoken word, rhythm, music, and movement to create an unforgettable storytelling experience for families and children.

Family Concert with Soul 4Kidz, Saturday, April 6, 10:30 - 11:15 am.

Listen to your favorite children’s songs, with a soulful twist! Sing and dance along with Soul 4 Kidz as they perform their version of classic hits such as Baby Shark, The Wheels on the Bus, Three Little Birds, and more.

Noel Hassen Unveils ‘Poetry for Me’: A Celebration of Poetry Month and Arab American Heritage, Saturday, April 20 2 - 3:30 pm.

Noel Hassan invites you all into the heart of her poetry during this special event.

Belly Dance Performance with Nicole Maria! Saturday, April 27, 2 - 3 pm.

Learn the art of Southwest Asian/North African belly dance with Nicole's interactive Performance, which will end with a belly dance lesson for all.

Nathan Page is our new Children’s Librarian. He was a long-time volunteer at the Oakland Public Library, managing the seed library and an organic gardening club. While a student at UC Berkeley he loved working with Special Collections of rare books, at the Bancroft Library.

When Nathan began his graduate work in Library and Information Science at San Jose State, he though his focus as a librarian would be as an Archivist working with rare books. Then he began to work with children at the Dimond and Temescal Branches and became really excited about becoming a Children’s Librarian. He loved that children became so excited about reading and about Storytime. Nathan worked with Books for Wider Horizons, a program that trains volunteer story readers in preschool or childcare centers. At PAL he is delighted that the Piedmont Avenue Elementary school is next door and so connected to the library. Nathan will be starting up our wonderful Storytime program on March 26th.

Tamika Austin is our new full-time Library Assistant. She too was a volunteer at OPL working with a Teen Group. She feels this is a crucial stage for children to turn in the right direction. Her work at OPL, for ten years as a Library Assistant at Rockridge and Golden Gate branches, is so much fun, she said, “it takes me somewhere else.”

Tamika is finishing her graduate degree in Library and Information Science at San Jose State and hopes to work as a Teen Librarian/Youth Services next year. But right now, she is writing a children’s book about Kwanzaa and perhaps her young daughter will

illustrate it.

Conversation with author Mark Greenside at our February meeting.

Friends of the Piedmont Ave Library (PAL)

Friends of PAL general meetings are changing to the fourth Tuesday of the month. The next meeting is Tuesday, March 26, 6:30 pm at the library, 80 Echo Ave. We will discuss the OPL Feasibility Study for the use of the abandoned building at 86 Echo Ave as the permanent home for our library. We have a lot of work to do in the next few months to make that possible. Please join us as we work for the future of our library.



It's time for the OPL Advocates 2024 Spring Mixer!

When: Sunday, April 14, from 1 to 3 pm

Where: In the courtyard outside the Main Library (125 14th Street in Oakland)

Why: To celebrate the Oakland Public Library and the volunteers who support it!

The program will include remarks from:

·        Library Director, Jamie Turbak

·        2023 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, Nairobi Barnes 

·        OPL staff, the Friends of the Oakland Public Library, the Bookmark Bookstore, and the Library Commission

Attendees will enjoy refreshments (courtesy of volunteers – feel free to bring a dish to share), meet other library supporters and book enthusiasts, and have the chance to win a prize from The Bookmark Bookstore, which raises money to benefit the entire library system. Will you join us? RSVP today today.

A Conversation Overheard

The author of If You Want a Monster For a Pet, Robin Bradford, in conversation with a fan, Wylder Hayes Hamilton, age 2-1/2.

 .

What you are reading, currently: “TYRANNOSAURUS REX VS. EDNA, THE VERY FIRST CHICKEN”

Sounds interesting: IT IS.

What do you like about it: IT STARTS OUT SCARY, THEN EVERYTHING TURNS OUT OKAY.

Favorite Genre: SCARY THINGS.

Can you give us examples? PIRATES, DINOSAURS, WOLVES WITH LONG, SHARP TEETH, IRISH DANCERS.

Irish Dancers? THEY’RE VERY NOISY.

Favorite readers: MOM, DAD, AND MY GRANDMAS.

Other notable book to recommend: “A PEACEABLE KINGDOM, THE SHAKER ABECEDARIUS”

What do you like about it? IT’S SCARY (DUH!) IT’S GOT A CAMEL, A WOLF WITH LONG, SHARP TEETH, AND A HYENA WITH LONG, SHARP TEETH.

Maybe a book that’s not scary? “BOATS ON THE BAY”

Are there sharks in that book? THERE SHOULD BE. IT’D BE WAY MORE SCARY.

Wylder Hayes Hamilton is an adventurer, playground enthusiast, and snappy dresser who someday would like to be a Pirate, a Fireman, a Garbage Truck Driver, or a Dredge Captain.

It's Women's History Month, and the Oakland History Center is recognizing the achievements of Oakland women! Among the events are these two:

Gertrude Strein’s Oakland: When there was there and when it wasn’t or was it    An exbibit at OPL’s Oakland History Center, 125 14 St, 2nd floor, until April 30.

Meet the Author: Halifu Osumare author of Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip Hop, and the Dunham Legacy, presents her memoir of her life and career from dance activist to scholar. Saturday, March 16, 2 – 4 pm, African American Museum and Library,

659 14 St. Registration is required - online or (510) 637-0200.

Women of the Avenue Shopping Passport



Support local, women-owned businesses on Piedmont Ave in honor of International Women’s Day through the Women of the Avenue Shopping Passport, where you could win fantastic prizes from your favorite businesses. Passports and stamps** are available at any participating store. Collect 6 stamps by March 31, and you’ll be entered in the raffle. Collect 12 stamps, and you’re entered three times. Once you’ve collected your stamps, complete your passport and return it to a participating store by March 31. Winners will win prizes from stores where they have received stamps. More information is available at https://www.piedmontavenue.org/

** No purchase necessary

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney [2021]

My wife and I and some family members are heading out to Ireland this summer and in pursuit of greater knowledge about Ireland I’ve been dipping my avid beak into recent Irish literature. I just finished Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World. It’s a wonderful, weird book. Like her first two novels she evokes the textured lives of her generation; their foibles, ambitions, ideas, ideals, feelings, fears and hopes. Rooney, in her early thirties, is fiercely bright and man! -or woman! - can she write! One of the remarkable traits of her writing is that, without being didactic or Cassandra like, she traces her characters lives and emotional fabric through social media, computers, smart phones, texts, and e-mails. Their lives are shaped and guided and distracted by digital devices. Yet these narrative threads are woven into an evolving zeitgeist.

The main characters in this tale are a successful author, Alice, and her old and dear friend, Eileen, a struggling Dubliner. Their correspondence makes for wonderful epistolary fiction. They write not only about love, but questions of architecture, anomie, art, writing, literature, faith, lack of faith, philosophy, and fear. Deep waters here! Alice’s lover, Felix, is a warehouseman from western Ireland. He is verbal but decidedly not at all interested in the world of letters. Eileen’s older lover, Simon, is an observant Catholic, a man of some means and education and they live on and off “in sin.” All lives are intertwined in the novel and they are the four wheels that drive the narrative.

The tale climaxes in the West of Ireland, close to the Atlantic, where Alice has moved to escape her life of literary celebrity and where Felix toils and drinks and sings his songs in the place he was born and raised. Alice’s dear childhood friends, Simon, and Eileen, seek eros, reconciliation, redemption and meaning. Class and gender tensions and frisson permeate throughout the novel but, in the end, all ends well. It has been said that the difference between comedy and tragedy is that one ends well and the other ends poorly. This novel -despite the characters’ multiple disquietudes, fears, and sense of foreboding- is a 21^st century romantic comedy.

What did I learn about Ireland through Rooney’s novel? Well, that the Irish continue to be world class wordsmiths, that they, like many cultures who’ve suffered under imperial blows, have developed a wonderful language and adopted the masters’ mother tongue and, with wit and indignation, overcome many humiliations and created a literature that is insolent and redolent with magnificent poems, stories, plays and novels. It also confirms my belief that Irish writers consistently write from their particularity but speak to universal moments of joy and despair and hope. A final comment on Rooney’s novel: There is only a shadow of Irish nostalgia in her novel for Irish resistance, politics, travails, and history in her fine novel, the nightmare from which Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus tried to wake. The zeitgeist, as it always, does twists in time’s wind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1S5bOdJq3U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5ja2trqrs

By Louis Segal. Louis was born in Oakland, raised his family in Oakland, dropped out of school in 1968, worked many jobs over the decades, dropped back into school in the 80s, got a Ph.D. in history, taught as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 2015. Retired but not withdrawn.