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News Archive

Ferbo Ligali: Paintings/Mixed Media

On exhibit at the Shirlington Branch Library, October – November 2017.

Pictures both figurative and abstract, the Ligalista style is characterized by being the fruit of the conjunction of several disciplines: chemical paintings utilizing chemical processes & materials, “physical” paintings utilizing 3D vision, bio-paintings utilizing algae, and lastly drum-paintings where the image has been formed in participation with a rock performance.

Want to buy something you see on our walls? Artists contribute 20% of sales made during their exhibit to the Friends of the Arlington County Public Library, to help support Library programming.

 

October 31, 2017 by arlingtonvalib

Filed Under: Art Exhibits, News Archive

Looking Back 12 Years

A Special Responsibility to Remember the Events of Sept. 11, 2001

As one of the three locations that directly felt the physical violence of the day, Arlington’s is a remarkable story of human resilience. 

“The obscenities of Sept. 11, 2001 exposed the difference between builders and destroyers. We are builders. Let us agree, on this anniversary, that it is an honor to be an American and it is an honor to be free.” — Leon Wieseltier, literary editor, The New Republic

There are many ways to learn more, or take part in the commemoration:

  • 9-11Read or listen to the Center for Local History’s oral histories from first responders and others 
  • Browse a collection of online resources that include photos and documents from 2001
  • Watch the video interview by Library Director Diane Kresh with Pat Creed, co-author, “Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11“
  • Attend County commemorations on Sept. 11, 2013
  • Visit the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial

 

 

 

September 10, 2013 by Web Editor

Filed Under: News Archive

Cherrydale Staff Greet Winter with Good Cheer

Will we get any snow this winter? If we do, the Cherrydale Branch Library staff will be dressed appropriately!

BT, Carolyn, Tim and Diane (left to right) show off their reading enthusiasm during the winter chill – because there’s never a bad time to read!

December 6, 2011 by Web Editor

Filed Under: News Archive

December Open House for Kids and Families

The Central Library will hold a Winter Open House in the Youth Services area on Thursday, Dec. 15, from 4:00 – 7:00 p.m.

We will have winter-themed crafts available in the children’s room, refreshments in the Rabbit Hole, and the librarians will share a winter story and song every half hour.

Come join us!

November 29, 2011 by Web Editor

Filed Under: News Archive

Kids Club's Kids are Scientists!

On Tuesday, Nov. 8, the Central Library Kids Club spent the afternoon working as engineers and scientists.

Their mission? To build a car that could be powered by wind!

November 9, 2011 by Web Editor

Filed Under: News, News Archive

Taylor Rhodes Bring her Passion for Service to Central Circulation

Nonprofit Fundraiser Understands Importance of Volunteering

Taylor spends her Sundays at Central Library, where she sorts books in the pre-shelving area, put holds out for patrons, adds new books to the New Books section, and does whatever else she can help with.

Taylor tells us, “I’ve been volunteering for two years, and I love it.”  She enjoys being a part of the library community so much that volunteering with us on Sundays is the high point of her week!

Outside of the library, she is a fundraiser for Mental HealthAmerica, a nonprofit organization that advocates for people with mental health issues and works to educate the general public about mental wellness.  Her job allows her to help people who need it most, and volunteering at the library allows her to help the community she lives in.

Taylor encourages everyone to volunteer when they can.

 

November 9, 2011 by Web Editor

Filed Under: News Archive Tagged With: Volunteers: meet our volunteers

More "Invent the Library's Future" Early 2012; No Nov. 10 Session


Many thanks to all who attended the Library’s two recent “Invent the Future” sessions this fall and to all who took our two surveys that focused on sites, staff, technology and services. We have learned much and owe that success to you. But we’re hardly done.

With the approach of the holidays, we’re going to take a break and will NOT have our scheduled Nov. 10 gathering at Washington-Lee High School. Enjoy your three-day Veterans Day weekend.

Early next year we plan to come to you, holding “Plan the Future” sessions at locations throughout the Library system. Watch this space, Twitter, Facebook, emails and library bulletin boards for details once the dates are set.

In the meantime, see the results of our recent surveys and continue to think of what you want from your library of the future.

Thanks for supporting Arlington Public Library.

Questions/comments, or just want to keep in touch?
Email libraries@arlingtonva.us and put “Future” in the subject line.

November 4, 2011 by Web Editor

Filed Under: News Archive

Keep Inventing the Library's Future–Second Session, Nov. 3 at Fairlington

UPDATE 11/1:

Please Note: For convenience, we’ve decided to cancel our Nov. 11 session in favor of public meetings at each of our locations (except Plaza) early next year. Dates and times will be posted online, on our social media and in our libraries. Enjoy the three-day Veterans Day holiday.

Read Arlington Mercury coverage of our first session.

Arlington Public Library continues with the second in a series of public gatherings to create—with its customers—a shared vision of the future for the Library.

The goal of these gatherings is to help answer questions like: Where are we going as a library? Where do we need to go? And what will it take to get there?

Please join us for Session No. 2: Storyboarding the Future of Arlington Public Library

Thursday, Nov. 3, 7 p.m.
Fairlington Community Center, 3308 S. Stafford St., first floor.

Building on our very successful Oct. 27 charrette at Walter Reed and our evolving main “plotlines”-—content, programs, technology and spaces—this public meeting will help organize our ideas for the future. By sorting them into short-term and long-term actions; strategic and operational opportunities; and lower impact and higher impact possibilities, we’ll chart the best avenues for implementation. And we’ll no doubt be adding some imaginative flourishes!
We’re incorporating survey results at our upcoming public discussions.

Questions/comments, keep in touch: Email libraries@arlingtonva.us and put “Future” in subject line.

October 27, 2011 by Web Editor

Filed Under: News Archive

Memories of Queen City

Did you miss last month’s Arlington Reunion History Program on Queen City? 

John Henderson grew up in Queen City

John Henderson grew up in Queen City

The Ballston-Virginia Square Patch sent a reporter to the program, and they have published an excellent recap:

In Queen City, a man sometimes didn’t know he was poor until he was 27 years old, say some of those who lived there. The tight-knit African-American neighborhood no longer exists, but the community’s spirit still survives in scattered memories.

Queen City was situated, based on different oral and written historical accounts, on a patch of land immediately west-southwest of where the Pentagon now stands and was the size of somewhere between two blocks to 16 blocks. In its place now is a sprawling intersection. The community was devastated and neighbors were dispersed in the name of progress.

“Queen City was not razed for the Pentagon building, but the overall Pentagon project. In order to accommodate the large number of individuals who would be commuting to and parking at the Pentagon on a daily basis, extensive accommodations had to be made for the automobile,” author Claire Burke wrote in Arlington’s Queen City. “The cloverleaf highway structure, which the Columbia Pike feeds into and is found to the west of the Pentagon, remains the exact location of Queen City. Therefore, Queen City was destroyed for Pentagon’s needed transportation corridor, which eventually would come to include over thirty miles of highways and ramps, including twenty-one overpasses.”

Originally the home of residents displaced by the federal government’s closure of Freedman’s Village — a post-Civil War attempt to house freed and displaced slaves — people in Queen City came from across the South. There, everyone knew each other, and each other’s business. Most families owned their own home, either a single-family home or a row house.

“A lot of them were built by local builders and a lot were built by the people themselves, the people who lived there,” said John Henderson, who moved to Queen City with his stepfather from Charlotte, N.C. The houses lacked running water and indoor plumbing. But there was a spring along the southern wall of Arlington National Cemetery. “There was a large pear tree right over the spring,” said Eddie Corbin, a former Queen City resident. “When they were ripe, they would fall into the spring. They were the best pears you ever tasted.” Residents walked every day and filled two or three buckets of water to take back home, he said.

Life in Queen City

Henderson and Corbin recently shared their stories of Queen City at Arlington Central Library. This article is based on their stories.

Henderson remembers no doctor, no dentist and no undertaker in Queen City. People had to go into Washington for those services. The doctors, dentists and undertakers in Arlington only served the white community. There is some discrepancy on this in written and oral historical accounts.

Queen City residents could only go to two hospitals — Freedman’s Hospital, which would later become the Howard University Hospital, or the District of Columbia General Hospital. But not many people had vehicles. If someone had an emergency, they had to find a neighbor with a car.

Based on Henderson’s recollection, Queen City proper had a church, a place that sold fish sandwiches, a gas station and a general store. About 16 blocks down the road, Henderson said, there was one barber shop, an ice cream shop, a grocery store, a fruit store, a post office, a brickyard and one pool hall. There, you would find one fire department and two shoe repair businesses — one in a storefront, and another in the form of a man who found his customers on foot. There were three churches — Mount Olive, Mount Sinai and the House of Prayer — four gas stations, three auto repair shops, two bus lines and a trolley. People worked and shopped at these places. Women also found jobs as domestic servants and some men worked for the federal government and at the cemetery, Henderson said.

Originally, the nearest fire station was on Virginia Highway at 23rd Street, said Corbin, whose father had been a firefighter. “We needed one, so (the residents) had dinners and parties and whatnot and they bought an engine and built the fire station,” he said.

Children walked to the black school, Hoffman-Boston Elementary, about three miles away in Johnson’s Hill — the community today known as Arlington View. The youngsters made a baseball field to play in and they made roller skates from things they found at the dump. They would skate across the 14th Street Bridge.

Young men from Queen City signed up for military service early on in World War II to avoid being drafted. Many families had ties to the military: Parents worked at different military installations, and older residents had fought in previous wars.

But then the military needed more.

A Community Lost

Plans for the Pentagon were approved in the summer of 1941, and construction was soon under way. A government surveyor came to Queen City a year before they started clearing people out, surveyed each house and recommended that residents make improvements. Building started at that time with little regard for residents and work happened around the clock.

Corbin remembers the construction of a large trench in the street from the future site of the Pentagon to Fort Myer. Afterward, he said, residents could not go out of their front gates. When the government did buy homes from the residents, it did not pay enough for the homeowners to build new houses in other black communities.

The relocation was devastating.

“Everyone who lived there was really separated. Some went to one area and some went to the other,” Corbin said. “Uncle Sam put up trailers on Johnson’s Hill and put up trailers in Green Valley.” Green Valley is in the Nauck community in Arlington. “The trailer city was there for another four years,” Henderson said. “People were put in what was called two-bedroom trailers.” Corbin had five people in his family, so they had two trailers.

Many families went to live in these trailers because they did not have anywhere else to go — the housing shortage in Washington caused by the war didn’t help. The shortage was only made that much worse by segregation, which further narrowed an already extremely limited range of places to live.

The trailers were rough temporary housing. They were joined together by a boardwalk and sometimes the rats were so big you could feel them under the floorboards, Henderson said. “You would be standing on the boardwalk and the rat would come and your whole body would shake,” he said.

There was also a communal building that housed bathrooms with showers.

“It was quite a trying time,” Henderson said. “I think the love and association of people is what kept people together. I sometimes thank the Lord that I was raised in that community. People didn’t have much money. The neighborhood itself, I don’t remember anyone getting angry at anyone… just a wonderful way to grow up.”

Henderson and Corbin both talked about how Mount Olive Church built it’s new home after being evicted from the land it had been on in Queen City, thanks to the construction of the world’s largest office building. The congregation brought some of the original bricks from Queen City to build the foundation of the new church. Boy Scout Troop 505 cleaned the bricks so they could be used. The community built the church and worshiped in a tent during its construction.

Queen City had been a strong community where even though there was not a lot of wealth, there was always enough food, clothing and support to go around. “It was a nice place to grow up,” Henderson said.

That community was lost to make way for the Pentagon.

October 26, 2011 by Web Editor

Filed Under: Center for Local History, News Archive Tagged With: local history news, Oral History

Poem: New In Arlington (Spanish / English)

Telling Our Story in Verse, pt. 2

In the spirit of Tell Arlington’s Story – Arlington County’s initiative to gather stories that demonstrate Arlington’s rich cultural diversity – the Shirlington Poetry Workshop has challenged writers to create new poems about Arlington.  

New in Arlington, by Carmen Marcus

We decided to leave the suburbs
hiding our fear of a new adventure,
a journey to search for a new urban home,
a place to rest our bones . . . and work and dream,
a place to keep on living.
We came to Shirlington Village, not quite a village, for it is more like a city,
we came to care for our elders, but ….I had to care for myself!
Sitting at the little plaza of Shirlington,
I feel the soft rain caressing my face
people come and go . . . suddenly they seem in a hurry
just like ants looking for hiding places
because the soft rain is now becoming a blustering storm!
Empty spaces . . . empty streets.
When the noisy storm passes,
the ardor of life returns,
in the evenings of jazz,
the music caresses the air
and the urban dance starts.
The small wooden bridge shines with the workers’ sweat,
workers, residents and tourists, walk down the avenue,
cyclists and runners, who barely seem to touch the pavement,
have to slow down for friendly dogs, discerning older couples and nannies with babies.
They all seem to dance around each other leaving their scents in the air.
Magic dance of life in the street,
each seeking their own dreams,
knowledge, pleasure and peace
and a small space to cradle the spirit.
Oh Arlington sensual cultural garden!
where sadness mixes with hope,
small oasis of struggle and pleasure
where I have met many inspiring souls
like the young man at the library
with the soothing masculine voice,
the one who guides poetic spirits . . .

It is perhaps my sensitive soul
that has found a place TO LIVE,
many come and go . . .
but I’d like to stay
If just to dream and love again!

Seguir Viviendo

Quisimos despedirnos de los suburbios
y escondiendo nuestros temores
cual sigilosa aventura
fuimos en busca de belleza urbana
de un lugar nuevo … donde apoyar nuestras cabezas
donde trabajar y soñar
y seguir viviendo.
Llegamos a la villa de Shirlington
como la llaman aquí…más ciudad que villa,
yo llegué para cuidar de los frágiles míos
pero fue que también, tuve que cuidar de mi misma.

Voy llegando a la placita de Shirlington,
y siento la lluvia como una caricia.
El sol se va ocultando con la amenaza de tormenta.
Muy pronto, muchos buscarán refugio en la biblioteca
pues veo la gente apresurada, que va y viene
casi como cuando las hormigas
corren a sus escondites para no ser destruidas.
Tan pronto como la tormenta pasa
el ardiente fervor de la calle retorna
y en las tardes de jazz
cuando la música acaricia al aire
el puente de madera se ilumina con sudor,
el sudor de los trabajadores que van al descanso.
Se siente vida . . .
Los turistas caminan lentamente, observando los escaparates,
corredores y ciclistas vuelan, apenas tocando el pavimento,
niños y perros juegan alrededor de sus familias o cuidadores,
el círculo de vida gira alrededor de la biblioteca.

Todos llegamos a esta placita,
tal vez buscando algo diferente,
ya sea conocimiento, placer o paz.
Todos tratamos de encontrar la esquinita perfecta
para acunar el alma
¡Oh Arlington jardín cultural!
donde las tristezas se juntan con las alegrías
Pequeño oasis de sudor y placer
donde he conocido seres que inspiran,
como el joven poeta,
quien con su voz suave pero masculina,
guía nuestros espíritus poéticos.
Pues es tal vez mi alma susceptible,
qué quisiera aquí plantar raíces,
Muchos solo vienen de paso…llegan y se van,
yo quisiera quedarme aquí,
¡Pues aun tengo ansias de soñar, trabajar y amar!
¡Y tal vez . . . otra vez VIVIR!

 

Learn more about the Poetry Workshop.

 

October 19, 2011 by Web Editor

Filed Under: News Archive Tagged With: Poetry: Our poems

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