Books salvaged from old East St. Louis library are abandoned again: For the 7,000 books sitting in a storage unit on State Street, it’s abandonment all over again.
The books were among at least 10,000 items including magazines and albums left in a shuttered city library for more than three years. Many of the items became makeshift beds or fire starters for homeless people, who broke into the library for shelter. A leaky roof damaged or destroyed many of the books in the building, at 409 North Ninth Street.
Library officials admit that they erred in leaving the materials behind when they moved to a new site in January 2001. The library board hired a consulting firm to determine what books would go into the new library but made no plans to find a home for those they did not want, which included city directories and other records that help track the city’s history from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Outraged city officials, who said they assumed the old library was empty, shooed away the homeless and boarded up the building in August 2004. Two months later, the city got inmates from the nearby Southern Illinois Correctional Center to box up the books and take them to a public storage facility, where they were to stay until the city could work with the library board and archivists to assess what should be salvaged and what should be tossed out.
That never happened.
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