Renovated Cossitt Library reopens Tuesday

The renovated Cossitt Library, the city’s first public library, will reopen in Downtown Memphis Tuesday, April 11, five years after it was closed and three years after work began.

The long wait ends with more than 10,000 books, an upstairs performance space, digital studios for podcasts and other digital communications and a café. There are also 3-D printers and sewing machines along with photographic and video equipment in the $6.8 million undertaking.

All of the work is within the 1959 annex at Front Street and Monroe Avenue.

Cossitt’s older portion, to the rear of the property, remains closed to the public.

“Yes, the books will bring you in and we still want to be able to provide that kind of access,” said Brian Lyles, Cossitt senior manager during a Monday morning media tour. “However, people also want more. They want community. They want to come around each other and share ideas and collaborate with one another. This is an opportunity to be able to bring people around for that reason.”

The open and adaptable spaces up the mid-century stairs will host performances, discussions and classes. When not in use, it retains a mid-century feel and design keeping with the era that followed the library’s original 19th-century incarnation as a red stone castle on the riverfront.

“Our programming is going to range. We’ll do some programming in audiovisual, some podcasting things. We have some programming in bringing people to the performance space,” Lyles said. “The library is the palette or the backdrop for people to bring their creativity here. The programming that you see it’s going to be all over the place but things that we feel like people want to see.”

The library’s history also figures prominently in several features.

The large mural by Anthony Lee that greets those who walk through the front door from the red stone courtyard depicts the city’s vanguard of civil rights attorneys making the first court appearances for students arrested in 1960 for sit-ins to integrate some of the city’s public libraries.

It’s an image Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland has talked about incorporating into a city-owned public space for several years. His initial idea was to use it in the former Columbus Park, across from the D’Army Bailey Courthouse, on the southwest corner of B.B. King Boulevard and Adams Avenue. That was after the statue of Christopher Columbus was relocated to Marquette Park in East Memphis.

But Columbus Park’s corner lot was later sold to Calvary Episcopal Church.

The history of the library sit-ins as well as the history of racial segregation that preceded the protests is chronicled on digital screens that include a list of those arrested in the protests.

A “social justice wall” of books — between the library’s soon-to-open cafe and a children’s nook — features books about the local movement as well as novelist Richard Wright’s autobiography “Black Boy” and his other works.

In the book, Wright wrote of going to the Cossitt in the 1920s and checking out books by saying he was checking them out for a white person. As librarians at the Cossitt began asking more questions, Wright encountered a white man who was willing to let Wright use his name on a more permanent basis.

Wright wrote that the books he sought out and some that were recommended opened up a new world as he and his family became part of the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the South. It was that migration that Wright told the story of in his autobiography and novels.

The renovated Cossitt was slated to open in October 2021 with an original cost estimate of $5 million.

Delays in reopening the Cossitt included some water damage from burst water pipes.

The weather also damaged the “Memphis Muse” sculpture in the library courtyard facing Front Street. A wing on the blue metal songbird depicted coming out of a large book was bent shortly after its installation in January 2022. The repaired sculpture returned to the courtyard this past September.

This article was originally published at “dailymemphian.com

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