HOLLYWOOD — The shelves are secondhand, the chairs do not match, and the sign in the window is printed on a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve. For a stretch of the neighborhood that has spent more than a year without its library reading room, it is enough.
The branch’s reading room has been closed since December 2024 for a seismic retrofit — the reinforcement of an old building against earthquakes — that has run longer and costlier than the city first projected. In the meantime the shelves that regulars used for studying, job hunting and simply sitting somewhere warm and quiet have stood behind plywood. So a handful of neighbors borrowed a vacant shopfront a few doors down and built a smaller version themselves.
They call it the reading corner, which overstates the square footage. It holds a few hundred donated books, a coffee urn that a nearby diner keeps filled, and four tables where people come to read the paper or fill out forms. A retired teacher runs a homework hour after school. On Tuesday mornings a volunteer helps older residents with the online government forms that no longer come on paper.
“People kept coming to the library and finding it dark, and you could see it on them,” said Ophelia Nakamura, 68, who organized the space and spends most afternoons in it. “This isn’t the library. I want to be clear about that. It’s a place to sit until the library comes back. But a neighborhood needs somewhere that asks nothing of you when you walk in.”
The pop-up is not a city project and has no city money. The landlord is letting the volunteers use the storefront rent-free between tenants, an arrangement everyone understands could end whenever the space is leased. The books come from donations and from a used-book sale the group held over the holidays. Nobody is checking anything out in the formal sense; readers sign a spiral notebook and bring things back on the honor system, which Nakamura said has worked better than she expected.
Library officials, asked about the effort, said they welcomed it and cautioned that a volunteer shelf could not replace professional staff or the branch’s full catalog. The retrofit, they said, remained under way, with a reopening still described only as sometime this year — a phrase that regulars have heard often enough to stop repeating.
Whether the corner survives long enough to hand its readers back to the real reading room is an open question. The storefront could be leased next month. The library could reopen in the spring, or not. In the meantime a boy did his multiplication tables at a wobbly table on Tuesday while an old man across from him worked a crossword, and the coffee urn ticked as it warmed, and for an hour the block had the thing it had been missing.