On behalf of the Chinatown Library Committee,

Community members are invited to send in letters of support for the next stage of working towards a Chinatown branch library. One way is to sign on to this letter of support below.

If you’d like to sign on to this letter, please contact Carolyn Rubin at carolyn.rubin(at)tufts.edu by Friday, May 6, 2016.

-Chinatown Cultural Center Committee/Friends of the Chinatown Library (Carolyn Rubin, Lydia Lowe, Kim Situ, Vivian Wu-Wong, Eugenia Beh, Allistair Mallilin, Rosann Tung)

 

Letter of Support 

Dear. Mayor Walsh, Dan Koh, and Jerome Smith:

 

We wish to thank you for putting a new feasibility and strategic planning study for a Chinatown library into the proposed capital budget.

 

We are community organizations and leaders representing a broad consensus in the Chinatown community in support of a public library branch for Chinatown. As you know, Chinatown is one of the few Boston neighborhoods which has been without a library since the 1950s.

 

For the past decade or more, the youth of Chinatown have revived and continued to advance the call for bringing a library back to Chinatown. In 2007, the City commissioned a feasibility and siting study for a Chinatown library, but progress was stymied by the recession that followed.

 

The Friends of the Chinatown Library, in various stages called the Chinatown Lantern Committee and the Chinatown Cultural Center committee, partnered with Boston Street Lab to pilot an innovative pop-up approach to urban library space and then with the BPL’s Copley Square facility and Asian CDC to develop the Oak Terrace Reading Room.

 

We have been heartened by Mayor Walsh’s commitment to develop a permanent branch of the BPL for Chinatown and see the China Trade Center, a BRA-owned building with several community offices, as a potential site for the library which can serve as an important anchor site on Chinatown’s border with downtown. With much development activity in the area, we believe there are opportunities to take a public/private approach to creating a library for the community.

 

The new feasibility and strategic planning study which you are currently proposing is an important step in helping us get to the community’s vision of a Chinatown library.  Thank you again for your support, and we look forward to continuing to work with you on this issue.

 

Sincerely,

Friends of the Chinatown Library/Chinatown Cultural Center

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