By Elissa Ely
Eight hundred people a day used to visit the Belmont Public Library on Concord Avenue when the building existed, and few of them ran into Peter Struzziero, the library director. Even fewer run into him now. You would need to hang a right off Grant Street onto tiny C Street, past Department of Public Works trucks and equipment, into a cavernous but immaculate town garage the size of a warehouse, and through a door that appears out of nowhere. It’s a little like spelunking, except there are windows.
Peter Struzziero. Photo courtesy of Peter Struzziero
The library’s reconstruction project is well underway, hopefully to be completed by late 2025. Meanwhile, the director’s interim office is rich with family photos, posters, a refrigerator, the imperative coffee maker, a few windowsill plants with questionable futures, and a trophy his team won at Trivial Pursuit during a librarian conference (“Never play Trivial Pursuit with a librarian,” Peter advises. “They know everything.”) The commuter rail rumbles by outside the window every 15 minutes or so: company of a sort.
High on a shelf, next to the trophy, there is a single book. The book is Frankenstein, and though Mary Shelley will never know, “it was my colleague in the journey of readership.” As a child with learning disabilities, Peter spent vast amounts of time in his Billerica library. He started with picture books like the personable Berenstain Bears, slowly moved onto books with fewer pictures, and eventually, to books with no pictures. Here’s where Frankenstein entered, with his cobbled-together body and tragically embittered heart. Horror stories have always dazzled Peter. For different reasons, libraries have, too.
“I should have been a car salesman, or a barber or a bartender,” he says. Instead, he became a librarian. Naturally, there is a story behind it. His was a single-parent family without financial resources, where Christmas vacation meant armloads of library books instead of ski lift tickets. One Christmas, a librarian at the check-out desk gently pointed out the $35 fine that forbade them from taking anything home for the holiday. Stressed and insolvent, his mother burst into tears. The librarian put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder and, just like in a novel, the overdue fine vanished. Books went home in the arms of the family, and Peter’s future path appeared. How could someone become a bartender?
After a stint in Disney World “with a walkie-talkie and a food cart,” followed by a college degree in communications and philosophy, he graduated in 2009 from the Master of Library and Information Science program at Simmons University. “I kept going to the library until they started paying me,” Peter says. Then he started paying back.
Librarians are caregivers. “This is an outward-facing organization,” he explains of his mission. “We don’t just sit in the building and give people a book.” Or course there is the One Book One Belmont community-wide program with its posters of local luminaries holding their books aloft (Frankenstein made a 2018 appearance). But the library is also the largest source of food donations to the Belmont Food Pantry, and it sponsors something like 500 programs a year, including a monthly Friday night movie series Peter has a special fondness for. “We’re a community center in this town,” he says.
“We’re guides for information” he adds, “and the more information that’s out there, the more we’re guides. A library has to adapt, adapt, adapt.” When vinyl records came into vogue back in the 1950s, libraries acquired records. When take-home movies arrived in the 80s, libraries acquired movies. And when the world went digital, so did the library. Peter spends much of any work day reading on screen, and as a result, enjoys paper books after hours. For the curious, his reach is broad: he’s reading one book about medicine and another about George Carlin.
Over the last 10 years, most of his tenure in Belmont has been focused on creating the new library. His vision required complete collaboration with the town from the start. Fundamental questions—should it be a renovation? an addition? an entirely new building?—led to hundreds of meetings. “We put in the effort, and let Belmont decide what this project should be, down to every square foot,” he says. Community fundraising was imperative, too, and eventually Belmont residents donated $5 million out of the projected $39 million cost. “I’ve never worked in a community so engaged and involved in its own success,” he says.
With shovels in the dirt now, Peter’s job has shifted. He spends a lot of time “staring at spreadsheets,” ensuring the new building comes in on budget and on time. He also manages the complex day-to-day requirements of three small, separated library spaces that miraculously compensate for one former 30,000 foot space. There is developing next year’s budget, and—of course—meetings (“a LOT of meetings”).
This is a library director who treasures his colleagues, including the current chair of the board of trustees (“I’m a product of her leadership—when we met, I was a ball of clay”) and the assistant library director (“My partner in all things, she’s the future”). Treasuring others comes with a self-appraisal that is modest. “My skill is in identifying people smarter than me to hire.”
This is also a library director whose photographed left arm was donated to a fund-raising calendar, the “Tattooed Youth Librarians of Massachusetts.” The arm is inked with portraits of wise men from the films of Peter’s youth: Yoda, Mr. Miyagi, even Willy Wonka. They’re variants on father figures, and also throwbacks to his film review site, The Big Brown Chair. He founded it “back when everyone had a blog.” The reviews were uniformly adoring, and though they did not bring him fame, they did bring him to the attention of a fellow reviewer who became his wife.
The era of wooden card catalogs with squeaking drawers is gone. So are the days when the sound of a stamp on a book meant its ownership was guaranteed for the next two weeks. But the days of the library are not. “For the most part, people don’t know who I am,” the director says. “But I’m here to make them fall in love with libraries.”
Elissa Ely is a community psychiatrist.
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