Counterpoint: D.C.'s Carnegie Library Is a Fine Place for an Apple Store

Washington D.C. recently announced plans to lease the Carnegie Library, a landmarked Beaux-Arts building built in 1903, to Apple for a new flagship retail store. Many have applauded the proposal, which will finally bring an active and functional use to a historic building that has long been underutilized, and which sits in Mt. Vernon Square, between the city’s convention center and trendy Shaw neighborhood, and the downtown retail and entertainment core. But the prospect of “losing” the former library to a corporate tenant has also been met with criticism—most prominently on this site, where CityLab’s Kriston Capps pleads that a site as grand as the Carnegie “deserves a public use,” ideally as an arts venue, not as a “gadget store.”

I get it. The building is old and ornate, and there’s some dissonance in imagining it as a place to purchase goods—though Apple has also emphasized their plan to host free daily classes on topics ranging from coding to photography. Like so many around the world, I grew up understanding that white-pilastered buildings like this one hosted quiet stacks of books or galleries of gold-framed paintings and dinosaur bones. They were built to elevate and highlight the gravity of their contents. In comparatively young America, classical buildings showed us, and the rest of the world, that our republic, institutions, and culture could match or exceed those found elsewhere. We mattered. And people like Andrew Carnegie invested in that belief for the betterment of our cities.