The gift of reading
Free Little Library is welcome addition to north St. Petersburg neighborhood.
When Maureen Palamati would look out the front door of her home off of 30th Avenue and 20th Street North in St. Petersburg, she would see a picturesque pond and benches to sit and take it all in.
Then one day in January she noticed an added bonus for her and her neighborhood.
A blue, repurposed newspaper box showed up with the words “You can find magic wherever you look, sit back and relax, all you need is a book” written in a Comic Sans down the side.
Inside the refurbished box she would find the gift of learning and education — free books.
The concept is simple yet has great impact. It started during the beginning of the Coronavirus lockdown, when there was so much more time for reading but with neighborhood libraries and bookstores closed.
That is when Kristine Dowhan saw a china hutch on the side of the road and hatched an idea to fill it with books for the community.
The idea took off and Kristine and her husband Michael bought a 1940’s era phone booth and spent a month turning it into a free library. That was soon not enough for the number of books that were being donated by their neighbors, however, and Kristine then reached out to the Tampa Bay Times for help.
