It wasn’t just St. Louis residents who were hit hard by the tornado on May 16. The libraries that serve them were also whipsawed by the cyclone that cut a 23-mile path through the region—and the St. Louis Public Library is still not sure when they will be able to reopen.
Both the Julia Davis and Cabanne branches suffered damage, with the Julia Davis branch hit harder. SLPL executive director Waller McGuire credits staff for herding the 30 or so people on site into the auditorium just before the tornado hit. “Windows blew out on all four sides of the building and parts of the roof were pulled up,” he says. “We had a 50-ton HVAC unit blown off the roof and land on cars.” A newly installed solar array, which helped reduce the branch’s dependence on the electrical grid, was also blown off the roof and destroyed.
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Staff emerged from the auditorium amazed that no one had gotten hurt.
“We had a lot of furniture and other things destroyed, but we didn’t have a single person injured, and staff ended up helping people over the broken furniture and out through broken doors and out of the building,” McGuire says. It would later take a month to restore power to the building, which can cause damage of its own. Staff had to move out the entire collection to a place with better climate control.
The Cabanne branch suffered the collapse of its ceilings. At that branch, built in 1906, staff shepherded patrons to a storage closet in the basement, which also prevented injury even as trees fell all around the building and its parking lot.
Why It Matters: Libraries, of course, aren’t just places to borrow books. They’re also a valuable resource for the community, offering a place to get cool in hot weather, warm up in cold weather, or connect to the internet. People also came to the Julia Davis branch for diapers, period kits, and food. Those services swiftly shifted to the Walnut Park branch. While McGuire knows having to travel farther for those necessities isn’t ideal, he’s been heartened by how many regulars have indeed made their way to a different branch.
“We can watch card numbers being used, and we know that cards that were being used at Davis and now being used at Walnut Park and Divoll and the Central library,” he says. Staff who have been transferred to those libraries also report seeing many familiar faces.
But it’s the ones they don’t see that McGuire worries about. “I have no question that we have customers who are just not able to do that,” he says. “We worry about that. I remember being at Julia Davis once when a little girl who was no more than six years old walked across Natural Bridge to come to the branch reading. And that’s something she won’t be able to do at Divoll.”
What’s Next: The library was fully insured, and has been given a partial payment, but negotiations are ongoing, McGuire says. And, as many homeowners are learning, even if the policy is fully paid out, the library will have to handle extra expenses such as co-pays.
And money isn’t the only thing standing in the way of reopening. “There’s so much work going on, it’s difficult even to find the people to do it,” McGuire notes.
But the library is determined to reopen as soon as it safely can. At this point, that’s a matter of months, not weeks.
That’s even as the library knows the important role it plays. “In many of our neighborhoods, and particularly in the two I’ve mentioned, around North Union and Natural Bridge, the library is really the presence of government and the community helping one another,” McGuire says. “It’s very important that we open those doors again and start welcoming people back.”
McGuire credits library staff for pivoting to keep programs going even when their own workplace had been hit. “Staff really stepped up and tried to give kids and families and everyone just a sense of normalcy and some relief from everything that happened,” he says. “We were lucky compared to many, heaven knows. And we’ll get back, but it’s still going to be a challenge.”
