The District of Columbia Historic Preservation Review Board granted landmark status June 28 to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. The move gives the 35-year-old modernist building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, legal protection against demolition.
Before his term ended last year, Mayor Anthony A. Williams floated plans to sell the deteriorating building to help finance a mixed-use complex that would include a new main library on the site of the old convention center. The preservation board’s decision came a day after the Washington Examiner reported that Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration would table Williams’s proposal and begin renovations of the MLK Library.
Alex Padro, an advisory neighborhood commissioner for the nearby Shaw neighborhood and former District of Columbia Public Library trustee who was instrumental in obtaining the designation, said the city supported the application, which would not have happened under the previous administration. “For years there was this battle raging between Williams and the library preservation and advocacy community,” Padro said in the July 3 Washington City Paper. “Finally, [now] that we have a new administration, and Williams is out of the way . . . we get the board to approve it.”
DCPL spokesperson Monica Lewis told the Examiner that the library planned to spend more than $2 million revamping the building’s restrooms, replacing over 1,000 ceiling lamps, modernizing three elevators, constructing a technology training lab, and replacing all staff and patron computers. However, following the landmark designation, Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper told the City Paper that the preservation board will now have to approve any change to the first floor or the exterior. “We don’t know at this point that [MLK] will not always be the library,” said Cooper. “We also don’t know at this point that [it] will always be the library.”
According to the Recent Past Preservation Network website, the MLK Library is the only monument to the late civil rights leader in the nation’s capital, the world’s only Mies-designed library, and the city’s only building by one of the “big three'” modern architects–Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe.
Posted July 6, 2007.