The Nice Queen

AS PROTESTS GO, THIS ONE IS downright amiable. On an unseasonably warm Sunday in March, 40 people have gathered on the steps of the Boston Public Library’s McKim Building in Copley Square for a read-in — a bookish riff on the sit-in — to demonstrate their displeasure with a plan to close several of the BPL’s neighborhood branches. The crowd ranges in age from infants in strollers to sexagenarians. Some chat among themselves, a few hold Sharpied “Save Our Libraries” signs, but most just sit and read their paperbacks. Their leader, a bespectacled Harvard postdoc named Brandon Abbs, speaks with a trickle of reporters and passersby, including a slim, silver-haired woman wearing black chinos and Asics, a black cardigan tied around her shoulders.

That would be Amy Ryan,the 59-year-old president of the Boston Public Library and, theoretically at least, the authority the crowd has gathered to oppose — The Man. But Ryan doesn’t look like The Man. She looks like a mom, one who doesn’t seem to recognize that she’s the object of these people’s ire.

“Isn’t this an honor? Isn’t this wonderful?” she repeats over and over, gazing at the protesters. “People really, really love their libraries.”


RYAN IS TALL AND ATHLETIC, with blue eyes and a friendly face unadorned by makeup. She favors Ann Taylor–esque suits, tweed jackets, and Nancy Pelosi–approved colored pearls.

She is also nice. Really, really nice. Hers is more than a run-of-the-mill pleasantness, though. It’s a specific sort of affability known, at least where she comes from, as Minnesota Nice: courteous, mild-mannered, disinclined to confrontation.

This spring, after less than 18 months on the job, Ryan found herself in the middle of a particularly not-nice budget battle, one blanketed by a thick layer of local politics. As part of an effort to eliminate a $3.3 million budget shortfall, Ryan and the BPL’s board of trustees had floated a plan to close some of the library’s branches. The announcement was followed by a month’s worth of contentious public meetings, in which hundreds of patrons, always distressed and often fuming, offered testimony against such a measure.

Part of the angst owed to the vagueness of the BPL’s proposal: Library officials didn’t list the potentially affected branches, and the number of possible closures reached as high as 10. Some worried that the process would pit neighborhood against neighborhood, and various Friends of the Library groups raced to collect petitions and prove that their own branches were more beloved, in better shape, and generally more necessary than others. In March, the Globe worried that “the genteel refuge of the Boston Public Library [was] threatening to become the site of a classic Boston brawl.”