My Favorite Library

(title sung to the tune of Robyn Hitchcock's "My Favourite Buildings"...)

I have to put in a good word for the Central Library in Downtown L.A., one of the most beautiful and underrated buildings in the city and a personal sanctuary for yrs truly whenever I'm killing a few hours in the area. They were actually close to demolishing this in the '70s, which wasn't such a radical idea at the time, just another bit of ye olde history-doesn't-exist-here modernist mythmaking and self-fulfilling prophecy. But they didn't demolish it, and a few decades and some nips and tucks later, it's stunning, full of detail, a cross between 1926 "Spanish" deco (think L.A.'s Union Station, although that's from 1939) and a small, vaguely exotic revision of the "City Beautiful"/Beaux-Arts ideal.

It's also locally infamous for being one of the only places downtown where anyone can loiter, sleep, or use the bathroom without being reprimanded by security. Downtown L.A. is thought to have the highest concentration of homeless people in a city that's cited widely as being the homeless capital of the United States, and guess where many of them go when they get kicked out of the shelters at sunrise, or just get tired of walking all day and want to take a leak and look at a magazine? Libraries are great for stopping, refreshing, collecting yourself. Better than Starbucks, and cheaper. The Central Library even has a cafe, if coffee has to be part of the equation.

The elevators are completely amazing -- the walls are clear fiberglass panels with the old printed catalogue cards lined up behind them, floor to ceiling, in alphabetical order. I think this transparent-walls-displaying-cool-innardy-shit is a trendy design concept lately, feeding off the building-materials-mania of a few years ago -- I just heard about an idea for a school (K-12 or somewhere in between) where the building itself would be part of the curriculum and students would get full visual access to the support beams, aluminum siding, wiring, etc. (Back when I was a product of NYC's decaying public school system, we didn't need prize-winning architecture to see any of this stuff, and we got asbestos as an added bonus.)

Anyway, yeah, there are books, and signs that helpfully tell visitors that most of the collection is deep-stacked away somewhere out of reach, and ask for it if you can't find it. But for a main library circa 2007 (libraries in crisis omgwtf), what's on the shelves ain't bad. It just about made my day yesterday when i saw a copy of Excelsior You Fathead.

These pictures don't do the library justice, but oh well. If you're in L.A. you've probably seen it a million times anyway.

Comments

[Anon]

"It's also locally infamous for being one of the only places downtown where anyone can loiter, sleep, or use the bathroom without being reprimanded by security. Downtown L.A. is thought to have the highest concentration of homeless people in a city that's cited widely as being the homeless capital of the United States, and guess where many of them go when they get kicked out of the shelters at sunrise, or just get tired of walking all day and want to take a leak and look at a magazine? Libraries are great for stopping, refreshing, collecting yourself."

Except that regular people find this population, accurately, disgusting, unhygenic, scary and often unsafe. Those homeless you believe are refreshing themselves are shooting up, drunk, insane and disorderly. If you loiter or sleep, you will in fact be woken and asked to move along, as this is SUPPOSED to be a library, not a FLOPHOUSE.

[Jody]

Somebody should tell the LAPL IT guys to get more secure webmail -- if I look up anon's IP I can see a link from someone's inbox with a not-very-anon e-mail address right there in the string.

[HR Dissertation]

Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!