The Perfect Library Down The Street

So we'd lived here 5 1/2 weeks yet I'd not visited our local neighborhood library only one mile away.

Yesterday I changed that.

I stepped into a dark, mysterious room and instantly felt catapulted back 80 years and into a whole other land. But actually, this room housed shelves of books for sale so the dark mystery of it all proved not quite so great, especially when you've got over-40 eyes like mine which can barely read without glasses in the light, let alone the dark.

Well, after lots of squinting and carrying books to the middle of the room beneath the one sorry-excuse-for-a-light, I delightedly found two treasures:

So with my two lovely books I stepped through a doorway into a tiny room to the left, one filled with sunlight from two huge windows, a sitting room with oak chairs worn smooth and the latest newspapers and a few magazines. 

Then I stepped into a hallway and followed voices and black-and-white framed photos of our town's early days until I came to a larger room with arched sunny windows and shelves full of adult fiction. While wandering around, I discovered a tiny corner room, perhaps 8 by 4, and I believe it held maps. 

How fun to just wander through this 1800's brick building where even the women's restroom off the hall appeared delightfully old, what with its heavy wooden door with a sheet of that special glass you can't really see through and it's marble floor.

Happy sigh. 

A mysterious, old library just down the street with tall, windows, marble floors and tiny rooms like cubby holes off larger rooms, all rather maze-like. 

In the 1920's the library shared that building with the police station, jail and post office (until the 1950's). There used to two smaller branch libraries like this one, but this is the only neighborhood library (I read online) which has survived.

And oh my, am I ever grateful it has.


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After reading that this building was one a police station, all those tiny rooms now make sense. Interrogation rooms and personal sheriff offices, etc., alas! Feels odd to think, though, that children were coming to this library while people sat in jail cells, below. Hmmm. 

The article I read said that the post office moved out in the 1950's, but it didn't say when the police station left.


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