Recently completed mural on Charles L. Durham Branch in West Philly's Mantua area on the corner of 34St. & Haverford Ave.

A thin elderly man sits on a stool by the door inside the Charles L. Durham library in Mantua, or as the locals call the area “The Bottom.” He chit-chats with the clerk at the check-out counter, and asks her to put on some Christmas music. The clerk returns with a cd and pops it into a boom box. A celtic version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen flows out of the speakers at a low volume.

The man by the door comments on the celtic nature of the tune. We get to talking, and he tells me he’s losing his hangout after 30 years because Mayor Michael Nutter, who he calls a “sorry bast**d,” is closing Durham along with 10 other libraries as part of a broader $108 million budget cut plan.

A portrait of the branch's namesake hangs on the wall. Born and raised in Mantua, Charles Durham later served on City Council and then as a judge in Common Pleas Court.

The Durham library is considered a gem in what’s otherwise a poor area where the median income falls below $20,000. Just last month, the Mural Arts Project completed a bright new mural that wraps around the library’s outter walls and even features faces of some people living in the community. But the mural will now hang more like a tombstone for the soon-to-be deceased Durham library. On top of that cruel twist of fate, donations from the United Way provided this September helped turn the branch’s run-down community meeting room, which the adjacent rec center shares, into a usable space. The loss of Durham also means the disappearance of a crossroads for residents from Mantua and the adjacent middle-class Powelton Village neighborhood to interact, which they often don’t.

Durham's recently resurrected and freshly-painted community meeting room

What’s more is that 20,000 books will now disappear from the fingertips of Mantua residents, including one of the city’s finest African-American collections. While Durham’s circulation numbers have slipped in recent years, especially after a broken HVAC system last year left the library closed for two months, the numbers are back on the rise and the branch continues to play a key role in the community. By day, it functions as the neighborhood’s de facto employment center where local residents can flip through reference books, use computers to apply for jobs and inevitably turn to library staff for help drafting cover letters and tweaking resumes. 

Durham has a wide selection of career books and college guides

After school, the branch runs the LEAP program, which all libraries across the city offer. The program provides children with homework help and other activities. Other nearby after-school programs in Mantua do venture to Durham.

The branch's after school program supervisor playing checkers with kids from the neighborhood

But the children at Durham aren’t the only ones doing their homework. Nearly everyday, 48-year old Drew Davis is at the library studying and using the computer to do assignments for the courses he’s taking at the Community College of Philadelphia. With the library only a block away from his house, Davis has always counted on the convenience and easy accessibility to use a computer there since he doesn’t own one. But with the library shutting down, Davis says he’ll now have to factor extra walking time into his already busy schedule between school and work to get to and from the next nearest branch, which is the Walnut West library located more than a mile away from his home.

Drew Davis doesn't own a home computer. He frequents Durham to look up information and study.

Like Davis, East Falls resident Cathy Kalb is also making arrangements to spend her afternoons at Walnut West. She currently tutors two sibblings from Mantua, who read at remedial levels, twice a week at the Durham branch. Now, Kalb plans to pick up the kids and drop them off, since they’d have to walk 2.5 miles roundtrip from home to meet her at the regional library.

Earlier this week, elementary school students and teachers from Mantua’s Montessori Genesis II school journeyed on the 2.5 mile roundtrip to the regional library. They wanted to make a point that walking to Durham, several blocks away from their school, is easier than trekking to 40th and Walnut Streets without any sort of transportation.  If the branch’s namesake, Charles Durham, were around today, his son Tracy says he would have protested the library cutbacks and marched right along with those kids, as he did in Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King during the 1960s. The younger Durham says his father’s first love was reading and writing, which catapulted him to become a civil rights advocate, lawyer, City Council member from 1967 to 1974, and ultimately a judge in Common Pleas Court. Durham passed away at the age of 61 in 1990, five years before the library was renamed for him.