HOLLYWOOD — On Tuesday and Friday mornings a folding table goes up on the plaza outside the branch library’s shuttered reading room, and by nine o’clock a short line has gathered behind it: a couple of parents with strollers, a retiree carrying a canvas bag of returned mysteries, a teenager who does his summer reading wherever the wireless signal still reaches.
The reading room has been closed since winter for a seismic retrofit, the structural bracing meant to keep the century-old building standing through a major earthquake. The work is necessary, and by the library’s own posted timeline it will not be finished for many months. In the gap, a branch librarian and two part-time aides have cobbled together a stripped-down service: a book-drop, a rolling cart of reserved titles, a laptop for card renewals, and, on the days the county can spare one, a bookmobile that parks along the curb.
“We didn’t want anyone to decide the library had left them,” said Corinne Athanas, the branch librarian, restocking a cart of picture books between patrons. “The building is closed. The library is not. Those are different things, and I say it about forty times a morning.”
The improvised version has obvious limits. There is no quiet corner to sit, no bank of public computers, no restroom. Holds ordered from other branches arrive a day or two slower. Toddler story time, once held indoors on a carpet, now happens under a canvas canopy that the aides fold away when the wind comes up off the Boulevard.
For some regulars, the pared-down setup has become the whole point. Gilbert Reyes, 74, who lives in an apartment nearby, comes both mornings whether or not he needs a book.
“I raised my kids on that reading room,” he said. “Now I just want somebody to say good morning and hand me the paper. The girl at the table remembers I like the westerns. That’s worth the walk.”
Others rely on it out of plain necessity. Nadia Coombs brings her two children on Fridays for the summer reading log and the free books the county sends over.
“We don’t have the internet at home, not the fast kind,” she said. “My son does his school list here. If this table wasn’t out, I don’t know where we’d put him.”
Athanas said the closure fell hardest on exactly those patrons — students without a quiet place to work, older residents who used the reading room as a cool, free room to spend a hot afternoon. The retrofit, she noted, means the building will still be there for their grandchildren, which is the argument she makes to herself on the windy mornings.
She keeps a hand-lettered sign taped to the table with the projected reopening, and crosses out the date each time it moves. On Friday a boy asked whether the real library was ever coming back. She told him it never went anywhere, then pointed him toward the cart and the next thing he had asked her to save.