In South Los Angeles, Eric Johnson, a well-dressed 17-year-old senior, said he spends nearly every day at the Ascot branch.
Johnson, who heads the Black Student Union at Jefferson High School, has seen up close the tensions pulling at his neighborhood. A food fight at Jefferson last April turned into a racial melee.
"This is neutral territory," Johnson said of the branch.
Sharing a scruffy corner with a Winchell's doughnut shop and an auto parts store, the neatly landscaped, sleekly modern Ascot branch seems as incongruous as its mission is ambitious.
Inside, there are hopeful signs for those willing to overlook noise and horseplay that would have horrified an earlier generation of librarians.
On one side of the wide-open branch, painted shades of purple and decorated with neon lights, boys in a racially mixed group cluster around a computer to admire 9-year-old Edward Sanchez's skill at blasting helicopters out of the sky as he dexterously plays Heli Attack 3.
Across the library, 9-year-olds Kelven Menchu, who is Latino, and Daquan Walker, who is black, sit at neighboring computer terminals and compare hot-rod designs on a game called Hot Wheels.
"People come here and they have to communicate with others," Johnson said. "They have to respect one another."
Los Angeles was once thought to embody that kind of optimism.
When city voters approved a bond in 1957 to build and expand 28 branch libraries, schools and universities, highways and subdivisions were being built for tens of thousands of Easterners and Midwesterners streaming into the Southland.
But in the decades that followed, the sheen came off the public libraries much as congested roads, smoggy air and racial violence tarnished the city's shimmering place in the national imagination.
By the 1980s, branch libraries had fallen victim to earthquake damage and years of tight budgets. Circulation stagnated.
In 1986, a devastating arson fire at the downtown Central Library damaged more than a million books.
The disaster was a turning point.
"I think people in Los Angeles really realized the value of what had been lost," said former City Librarian Susan Kent, one of the visionaries behind the branch library construction program. "The library really emerged phoenix-like from the ashes."
Civic leaders put together a proposal to add new libraries to the San Fernando Valley for the first time in more than a generation and to renovate more than a dozen aging branches.
