New Institute Library Chief Seeks To Branch Out

Valerie Garlick’s journey to executive director of the Institute Library started with a single thought, while her eyes were glued to the building’s extensive water damage: I could fix that.

That was two years ago, on a tour of the the private lending library and musical- and literary-happenings center a half-block from the Green. It was long before the position for executive director opened up. By the time it did, it felt like fate.

Now two months into her tenure as the library’s new executive director, Garlick is on a mission: Finish the capital campaign that her predecessor, Natalie Elicker, started, and get more of New Haven into the Institute Library. Or rather, get more of the Institute Library out into New Haven.

Nineteenth-century benefactors created the private library as a place where working men could obtain books and converse about civic matters. Public libraries didn’t exist yet. In the Institute Library’s heyday, orators such as Henry Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville stopped by. The library had as many as 500 members. It hosted debates on questions like ​“What is the greatest evil to the public: intemperance or slavery?” And ​“Are novels injurious to a reader?”

By the dawn of 21st century, the library, still tucked away upstairs in its narrow lower Chapel haunt, had become virtually invisible. Membership dropped below 200. Few, if any, events took place there. Then a new group of volunteers and staffers revived the institution as not just a library but a community meeting place and a host for cutting-edge literary events.

“I’d like to bring more people more events, more programs, more liveliness” to the IL, Garlick, 33, said in an interview, gesturing to the green glass lamps, large plants, and shelves of books behind her. ​“But also to bring the Institute out more into the community, to get people talking about it. We’re very tucked away and that is a blessing and a curse.”

A blessing and a curse that she believes she can take on. Former Directors Will Baker and Elicker saw a chance to expand the IL’s centuries-old mission of ​“learning in a context of mutual encouragement” with literary events for and by the community, monthly Amateur Hours, Listen Here sessions where stories came to life, and musical events peppered in. Garlick is thinking of adding a film series, more activity in the second-floor gallery, monthly nights for string, folk, and bluegrass music, and lots of things that happen outside of the 847 Chapel St. building’s walls.

“It’s a community,” she said.

That kind of thinking about the position all started on a 2014 tour of the space, which had flown under Garlick’s radar until she was working as an adjunct professor at Gateway Community College and planning a tour of the downtown arts and culture scene for her students. Armed with MA degrees in both studio art and art history from the University of Connecticut, Garlick envisioned the whole thing as a wide loop around downtown. Hanging between the Yale University Art Gallery and the galleries dotting the Ninth Square, the library would serve as the halfway point, and then they would move on.

But Garlick never moved on, mentally, from that first visit. As soon as she had pressed the library’s tiny brown buzzer and heard the click that would let her inside, Garlick sensed something changing within her, a realization that was starting to swell. As students walked up the rickety, dust-scented staircase into the main room, she was captivated by the rows of wood bookshelves and the old moulding that housed them, a gem-green carpet turning the space quirky and enchanted. An additional upstairs gallery where shafts of afternoon light fell across the floor, catching even the walls by surprise, delighted her.

But she could also hear the building’s groaning growing pains, crystallized in the library’s perennially damp air, chipping paint, and water-stained walls. It was magic, but there was a lot that one would need to do to preserve it.

The idea of extensive preservation didn’t scare Garlick; it enthralled her. She had just overseen a massive project removing water damage at The Carriage Barn in New Canaan, where she was working as its executive director as she juggled her teaching load. Even before she met Elicker — an encounter she describes as ​“as close to an ​‘it’ moment” as one gets — she was thinking about the similarities between the two institutions. Both were historic and needed some extra love; both were member-led, with advisory boards, small armies of volunteers, semi-hidden gallery spaces, and several cultural events. Both struggled to bring in the diverse communities they hoped for. 

The idea of working at the library reignited in her brain each time she brought her students and saw how much ​“the students lit up,” how kind the volunteers were. When a colleague pointed her to the vacancy earlier this year, it didn’t feel like an application she could pass up. After stints at both The Carriage Barn and Real Art Ways in Hartford, the idea of continuing the library’s capital campaign — while making sure the roster of ongoing programs, the affinity groups like LGBTQ Youth Kickback and The Word that used the space, and the gallery schedule remained consistent — didn’t make her shy away. It made her want to do it. Even the grant-writing part. In the name of historic preservation, so that people well beyond her tenure might use the space happily.

That’s a big role to step into. Grants that Elicker wrote during her tenure have almost all come through — the largest from the state Department of Economic and Community Development — there are still a lot of donors that need to be cultivated and funds that need to be raised to take the library ​“back to what it began as” while historically preserving it.

“There’s so much to learn,” she said. ​“There’s so much to take in … it’s wild. I’m looking to do more in the space for all ages, all perspectives.”