‘Here Come the Brides’ exhibit at the MPL

The Malden Public Library’s historic wrought-iron gates have been restored  to their original condition and returned to the Salem Street entrance where they have enclosed the walled garden, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, at the front entrance, since 1911. They were designed by Ludvig Sandoe Ipsen, purchased in 1910 from a $1,000 donation from Mrs. Lillie A.B. Hill of Malden and produced by W.A. Snow Iron Work, Inc.  L.S. Ipsen, decorative artist, was born in Denmark and a graduate of the Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen.  He arrived in Boston around 1867 and eventually moved to Malden. Expressing himself most famously in the decorative arts and illustration, Ipsen was most noted for his book covers, book titles and book plates according to The American Bookmaker, July, 1886.  His illustrated work of “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” by E.B Browning (Tribner & Co.), was described as having been decorated “with exquisite draughtmanship and engraving and designed with taste and grace such as we rarely find surpassed” by The Athenaeum Journal of Literature, Science, The Fine Arts, Music […]

By Amanda DeRosa  On the Brooks Estate in Medford, once a part of Malden, there is a brick wall about three feet high, built by an enslaved man named Pomp. Pomp’s Wall serves as a reminder that there were enslavers in New England, just as there were enslavers in the South. “It is important that people understand that Northern slavery was significant and involved tens of thousands of enslaved people,” said Dora St. Martin, director of Malden Public Library, who is leading a long-term research project, titled “Black Lives (Enslaved and Free) in Colonial Malden.”   “This project hopes to provide a view into the lives (of) free and enslaved Blacks in Malden from 1760 to 1800.  The project will allow us to understand the centrality and importance of African Americans in the history of the founding era of Malden,” St. Martin said. St. Martin recently hosted a public Zoom lecture event, detailing updates on the research team’s findings. The lecture was funded in part by Revisiting the Founding Era, a four-year national initiative of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History presented […]

By Sandra G. Ndengue All the media  — even TV comedy shows – were focusing on the pandemic. I needed a respite from fear and panic. So I opted for a sweet escape: reading, done at convenience via select outlets. Reading has always been a place for discovery, exploration, and travel. It’s like being in a time capsule, anywhere. My usual reads are nonfiction, autobiographies and memoirs — books that  help me understand and navigate someone else’s life experiences, living in their truth and finding a deeper connection. But during the pandemic, my reads were mostly fiction, focusing on African authors around  the globe and exploring culture in their respective world and how their origins and perspective affect society and how they developed as persons. With the lockdown, lots of people have found solace in reading.  “Before the pandemic more people borrowed non fiction and  memoirs but now people seem to fall back to fiction, fantasy and classics,” said Dora St. Martin, Executive Director of the Malden Public Library. Shaneuik, a 37-year-old nurse at a Boston Hospital, mom of two and former Malden […]