Branching Out

Next American City magazine, Issue 26, pg 12

When Jerome Chou heard that economic factors were forcing the Brooklyn Public Library to suspend their Sunday services earlier this summer, he rounded up a group of volunteer library students, architects, and designers to form a temporary library, called Branch. For two months last fall, Chou, who works for the Design Trust for Public Space, and Branch volunteers set up a card table, some metal chairs and milk crates filled with hundreds of donated books on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. They would call out to anyone walking by (“Hi there, we’re a temporary neighborhood library!”) and loan out books to eager readers. As word of the project got out, Branch’s book collection grew each week. “For the most part, they came from the local residents,” Chou says. “They were curating the collection.”

When people checked out books at Branch, they were asked to fill out a “memory card” with a short anecdote about the neighborhood. The memory cards were slipped into wax paper envelopes and placed in the back covers of circulating books. The messages ranged from the painfully generic – “I like this neighborhood because it is nice and peaceful” – to stories of house-hunting and quirky escapes in a nearby park.

Though the project ended in December, the collection now lives on at the Brooklyn Hospital Center. “The project was all about being flexible and improvising based on what you had,” says Chou. “It was a great platform for experimentation.”