A New Permanent Public Library

Chinatown A-VOYCE School Year ‘21-’22

 

Photo by Daniel Tran

The Problem

In one of our workshops, the A-VOYCE youth learned about the history of the Chinatown library. Chinatown has not had a public library since 1955 after it was demolished for the highway. Since then, the community has been fighting for a library which would not only bring back access to books but also multilingual services and an intergenerational community space.

 

Our Solution

The A-VOYCE youth were excited to learn that a new library is to be built in Chinatown in the next couple of years in Parcel R-1, right across the street from Hudson Street Stoop where we hold workshops! The cohort brainstormed around the core question: How might we create momentum to build the library for the Chinatown residents in order to have a shared community space to preserve, teach, and appreciate Chinatown history?

Our answer to the question? A big community event!

Photo by Daniel Wong

PROCESS

To plan our community event, we invited teaching artist Mel Taing. Through multiple workshop sessions we planned a small prototype event to test our ideas and get community feedback. 

Photos by Mel Taing (@m.ltaing on Instagram)

FINAL EVENT

Chinatown Connections honors the history of the library and celebrates its future. The event not only brought the community together with fun activities like making your own bookmark or going on a scavenger hunt to piece together the Chinatown library history, but it invited folks to invest in the Chinatown library together. 

Photos by Jessie Li