The library as culture house

2004–2026

The one civic room the place ever voted itself into being became its culture house. The Harris Branch of the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library — 51446 Elm Road, opened August 2004, its building finished the following fall — belongs as an institution to the Government leg, which carries the library district whole. Its cultural course is this section's, and the South Bend Tribune's coverage gives it an unusually full one. The branch was dedicated, in the paper's headline, "to the sound of music": a reference librarian, Susie Cleaver, appears in the dedication coverage designing scrapbook pages of the building's own making with a Granger mother and her seven-year-old, while another reference librarian, Andy Schmidt, is shown at the branch's piano in the paper's photographs. The scrapbook was not a one-day prop. By 2005 the branch was hosting Saturday scrapbooking sessions — residents bringing boxes of photographs to work on their family albums in the library's rooms, under the paper's headline "Maintaining memories" — a new suburb with no archive of its own, keeping its memory at library tables, in the librarian's phrase and the paper's telling. In July 2006 the Granger Garden Club planted the branch's entrance garden, and the Friends of the Library set in it the place's best-documented piece of public art: a bronze-finish statue of a garden fairy watching over a sleeping child who has nodded off on a storybook — a monument, at garden scale, to reading itself, given by the library's friends and planted around by the club. The branch's later course is the system's plan: the library's 2023–27 long-range plan schedules the Harris Branch for a major renovation — teen space enlarged, an adult reading room made, youth areas rebuilt as flexible programming space, a courtyard added. Twenty years on, the culture house is being refitted for the same use it was dedicated to: a room where a place with no town hall gathers around books, music, and its own photographs.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, as cataloged in the newspaper indexes: "Branching out; Harris library dedicated to the sound of music" (2004) — the dedication, the scrapbook of the building, and the librarian at the piano; "Maintaining memories; Library offers space for working on scrapbooks" (2005) — the Saturday sessions, Susie Cleaver named; "Of books, begonias; Granger club plants garden at Harris Branch" (July 2006) — the Garden Club's garden and the Friends' statue, photographs by Greg Swiercz; "Harris library a success" (2005) — the August 2004 opening, construction finished that fall, branch manager Sarah Bard.
2. Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, Long Range Plan 2023–2027: the Harris Branch renovation as scheduled — the institution's own published record.