On a close-knit residential street in San Francisco’s Lower Pacific Heights, a miniature wooden cottage serving as a community library lay violently ripped from its stand constructed in the shape of a cherub. Its door, torn completely off, had been hurled into the middle of Pine Street, and its books were left scattered across the busy roadway and atop parked cars down the block.
Susan Meyers, a psychotherapist and grandmother, was watering her back garden when someone tore apart the library last Tuesday afternoon. She didn’t see or hear it happen, but when her husband came home and told her what he had found outside, she broke down in tears.
“It was so shocking, so, I called my friend … who lives two doors away, and I left her message and within a minute, she, her boys and her husband came down, and we just all cried together,” Meyers said.
It was the third time in recent years that the neighborhood fixture had been vandalized – and the third time its owners and neighbors rallied to rebuild it. With no eyewitnesses or security footage, Meyers doesn’t know who caused the latest destruction. She doubts the library itself was the target, believing instead that it was damaged in a random burst of violence. This week, the Meyerses decided to file a police report.
After clearing the mess, Meyers’ husband posted a sign asking neighbors to think “good thoughts” for the person who had knocked the structure down.
“Obviously, nobody in their right mind would do that. It had to be somebody who’s in deep trouble,” Meyers said. “On a broader level, it’s disturbing that our society is in this place where these people are not taken care of and they’re harming innocent people, innocent property. It’s a failure on everybody’s part.”
When the structure was first built roughly 10 years ago, Meyers cleared her personal book shelves and bought books from Goodwill to stock the little library’s shelves. Since then, the library has grown into a community hub. Nannies and parents read to their children on the bench and neighbors drop off books so often the shelves are usually packed. Even neighborhood dogs have a reason to stop: Beside the library sits a miniature house stocked with biscuits.
The library was first vandalized roughly six years ago, with relatively minor damage that included a broken door and books thrown about.
About two years later, a passerby smashed the child angel statue holding up the library. The cement base was broken into eight pieces, Meyers said, and her friend Val Rosas, a contractor, painstakingly glued it back together.
The neighborhood’s protective instinct was activated again last week. Several neighbors knocked on Meyers’ door to try and provide help, and a neighbor offered to build them a new library for free. Ultimately, Rosas drove two hours from his home in Tracy to repair the library last weekend.
One week after the vandalism, a young woman sat on the bench beside the rebuilt library as longtime neighbor Brian Vouglas talked to her about the recent destruction. Vouglas, who has lived at the corner of Pierce and California streets for decades, has visited the library to organize its shelves for years.
Vouglas described the most recent vandalism as “disheartening,” adding that the library is a source of joy for many in the community.
“It’s a fine opportunity also for folks to, you know, add some brightness to our neighborhoods, especially with everything these days,” he said. “It’s just also tumultuous and distressing.”
Besides the repeated destructions, the little library also faced an existential threat from the city itself in 2023, when an anonymous complaint led the city to tell Meyers she would either have to remove the library or pay a $1,400 fee for a “minor encroachment permit.”
Meyers resisted the fee, arguing that little libraries should be encouraged throughout the city. Eventually, her fight helped spur new city legislation that made it easier to create little libraries, including exemptions from minor-encroachment permit fees.
Protecting the library from sidewalk scuffles has been a harder thing to settle. Meyers plans to install a vibration sensor that will trigger an alarm if the library is seriously disturbed.
“It’s very dispiriting, of course, and very disturbing,” Meyers said. “But we’re not going to let one person ruin it for a lot of people, so we will build it as many times as we have to.”
At times, Meyers will awaken in the middle of the night and peek out her window to make sure the library is still there.
“If we hear a noise, and this has happened each time for quite a while after, we hear a noise on the street or some rattling or some people yelling or something which happens everywhere, we always wake up and look out, make sure that, you know, people aren’t doing something to hurt the library,” she said.
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This article originally published at Why does this San Francisco Little Free Library keep getting destroyed?.