"One of the reasons we were told that we desperately needed a new library in a new location was that the old library on Church Street, across from City Hall, was so decrepit and falling apart and costly to renovate that it was better abandoned and made an 'opportunity site' for some other, unspecified development," writes Stephen Kessler. "That library, still presumably crumbling, for now remains our downtown branch, and we can only hope it survives until the mixed-use project is more than a figment of Mathews’ (and housing expert Don Lane’s) imagination."