On a dusty, hot summer afternoon in South Los Angeles, 13-year-old Joseph Robinson and 9-year-old Franklin Flores are in a favorite place -- huddled in front of a computer terminal playing RuneScape together.
For the boys, one black and one Latino, the new Ascot branch library at Florence Avenue and Main Street is their daily meeting place, a refuge from a gritty neighborhood where interracial tensions recently sparked violence at a local high school.
In the Pico-Union neighborhood, older residents go to their new branch for a library-sponsored Coffee and Conversation, which brings together strangers to talk about Iraq, immigration or whatever topic may be in the news.
And in Chinatown, dozens of immigrants flock to the 2 1/2 -year-old branch for a weekly citizenship class at which, between gossiping with friends, the students prepare for the test by shouting out answers to questions about the Constitution, communism and the Supreme Court.
This is the new face of public libraries in Los Angeles -- versatile and thoroughly modern places that have fueled a 70% explosion in library usage over the last decade.
It was not always so. For years, cramped and crumbling branches testified to a civic purpose sapped by riots, tax revolts and urban decay.
Today, Los Angeles is nearing the completion of a $317-million modernization program to build and renovate 63 branch libraries, finishing them on time and under budget. Librarians from as far away as Singapore and Sweden have come to see what the city has accomplished.
How Los Angeles rebuilt its libraries is more than just a public works success story.
In an atomized city where social isolation is almost a civic credo, the rebirth of branch libraries appears to reflect another side of the metropolis, both more prosaic and more humane. Libraries are filling a demand for community.
These public institutions are encouraging ties between immigrants and their new city as well as helping to bridge divisions of class and race with the simple act of bringing Angelenos together in safe, beautiful spaces.
"Perhaps we ought not to make too much of a library. It doesn't make the poor un-poor. It doesn't heal the sick," said D.J. Waldie, a writer and longtime observer of Los Angeles. "But libraries are a charmed place
In South Los Angeles, Eric Johnson, a well-dressed 17-year-old senior, said he spends nearly every day at the Ascot branch.
