At 07:41 PM 1/21/02 -0600, Pam Blixt wrote:
>
>In the Upper Peninsula mining town of Calumet, they took the utility
aspect of the
>library seriously when it was built in the last century.
||||||||||||
[info about community saunas snipped with a suggestion we might want to do
the same in our Minneapolis P.L.]
I'm going to assume you mean Calumet built its library in the 19th century,
not the 20th. In the 19th Century, few houses in semi-rural or rural parts
of the country had running water, not so many in cities had running water,
either. Recall that the J.J. Hill bathtub and bathing room is a feature of
the house--explained as a modern innovation in the no-expenses-spared home
of an extremely wealthy man. That house is probably contemporary with your
Calumet library (but I've written the Michigan Historical Society to find
out more about it for you.)
I THINK running water stats may be in the census pack of information, but I
know the stats are findable for Michigan U.P. Indoor plumbing really
didn't become a norm until well into the 20th century, actually.
Moreover, Upper Peninsula was settled in part by people from Finnland and
other Scandinavian countries where community saunas were a common, and
people brought many old country ideas to use in the new country. I believe
community saunas were still fairly common on the Iron Range in the 20th
century--a few are still around.
If you fill in the picture, putting saunas in a community building makes
lots of sense, when, where and why it happened. If you take a 19th century
remote idea and hold it up as a standard of what Minneapolis should/could
be doing, I'm not so sure I'd want to follow your lead.
I don't really think that 100+ year old small town needs should be
addressed in a 21st century library for a major metropolitan city.
Probably we'd be happier taking care of our own needs and trying to
anticipate needs of future generations.
For me, that translates into building as much space as possible for open
shelving, and into giving people as much easy access to the building as we
can possibly plan for.
When autos become the least reasonable means of transportation, people will
stop using them. In the mean time, we can look at Library/Transit passes
as a way of encouraging bus use for those who can (are able to) use the
bus. Anybody got some bright ideas for funding that?
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