A Library Legend

The Fishtown Branch was saved once before.

by Isaiah Thompson

history

This past Monday night, more than 100 people rallied outside the tiny Fishtown Library on Montgomery Avenue to show their support for the institution and to protest Mayor Nutter's recent announcement that, due to a budget shortfall, it and 10 other neighborhood branches would be closed. 

The library staff — clearly happy to see the support, but also rattled by the invasion — watched a little nervously as the crowd poured in and out of the small building to sign petitions.

Amid the throng sat an elderly man, plopped comfortably in a chair and chatting with people as they went by and paid polite respects.

"He's kind of like the patriarch of Fishtown," one woman explained to me.

The man, who is 84 years old (he adamantly refused to allow his name to be printed, saying he didn't want people in Fishtown to think his head had gotten big; let's call him Frank) had come out with his neighbors to support the library, of which he is a grateful patron.

"I like thrillers!" he declared. The possible closing of the library, he said, was "very distressing."

But living in the same neighborhood for more than 80 years lends a bit of perspective. And this, he explained, wasn't the first time the library had been in trouble.

"The last time it happened, there was a lady, Mrs. Stepnowski," Frank said, "who saved it."

It was in the early '80s, he said, when the library's existence was first seriously threatened. Housed in an old fire station, the library was even smaller then than it is now, occupying only one floor of its tiny three-floor building. Still, it was utilized. When librarians held an annual party for the neighborhood kids, the place was packed.

"It would be standing-room only for the kids, from the front door to the steps at the back," remembers Fran Stepnowski, daughter of the late Mrs. Stepnowski of library fame.

According to Fran and others who were around at the time, the Philadelphia Free Library planned to close the branch, but neighbors rallied to the cause, forming the first ever Friends of the Fishtown Library Association. Their first president was Mrs. Stepnowski.

Born to Polish immigrant parents, Mrs. Stepnowski was her own neighborhood institution. She had given birth 16 times — almost all of them home deliveries, her daughter Fran says. She was strong-willed, civic-minded and passionate about education and her library.

Under Mrs. Stepnowski's leadership, the brand-new Friends association began a petition drive, a letter-writing campaign, and even bused children and elderly residents in to speak at council meetings.

"She liked holding public office," Fran, who also volunteered with the Friends, remembers. "She had a very strong personality to keep everybody focused. There was no way we were ever going to back down."

But Stepnowski's most drastic measure was something she did on her own: She invited then-city managing director Wilson Goode, who would later become mayor, over to her house for a snack.

"She was just so incensed, she wroteto Goode and invited him over for tea and babka" — a Polish sweet bread — says Fran.

"He came over and then she walked him down the street and showed him the library and lectured him thoroughly."

"Yes she did, she certainly did," confirms Doris Morris, former secretary of the Friends of the Fishtown Library Association. "He sat in her kitchen and they talked."

In the end, the story in Fishtown goes, the forceful Mrs. Stepnowski got her way. The library not only remained open, but was renovated to include the third floor, where Mrs. Stepnowski's determined visage still hangs — for now.

"She was a wonderful lady,"says Morris fondly. "That's why her picture's in that library."

Today, the Fishtown Library serves a small but steady patronage in the neighborhood.

"We had good patrons and good programs," says Margaret Snow, now retired, who worked there. "I've seen children grow up and now they're married. It's definitely a community library. ... I'm very sad to hear that it may close. I hope it doesn't."

Stepnowski's daughter shares that feeling.

"My mother really believed in libraries," she says. "She thought it was part of, you know, democracy. She used to say, 'Whaddya want, a city full of dummies?'"

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)