HOLLYWOOD — On the hottest afternoon of the year I counted the air-conditioned rooms within three blocks of my apartment that I could sit in for two hours without spending money.
There is one. It has a coffered ceiling, forty-four chairs, and a card catalog nobody uses that a preservation consultant fought to keep.
Everything else on those three blocks is a transaction, and I want to be fair about that, because the transactions are not villains. The café will let you sit for the price of a four-dollar iced coffee and, if the barista likes you, a good deal longer. The bar opens at four. The hotel lobby is beautiful and will tolerate you for about twenty minutes, which I know because I have tested it. The grocery store is cold and has nowhere to sit, which is a design decision, not an accident.
None of them can do what the library did last week, and it is not because they are ungenerous. It is because a business that lets people stay indefinitely without buying anything stops being a business. A café with forty people in it nursing tap water at three in the afternoon has a problem it must solve, and it will solve it, kindly or unkindly, with a sign about laptops or a two-hour limit or a barista’s apologetic hover.
The reading room has no such problem, because the reading room is not trying to make money. That is the entire feature. It is very nearly the only thing in my neighborhood built on that principle, and for four days in July it was the difference between comfort and danger for a number of people I do not know.
I sat there on Tuesday. It was 104 outside. Eleven people were in the room and one of them was reading. There was a woman in nurse’s scrubs asleep upright in a chair with her bag on her knees, off a night shift, going home to an apartment whose air conditioning had failed on Sunday. There were two men at the end of a long table who had folded their arms on it and gone still. A grandmother had three children at the periodicals table with a deck of cards.
Nobody asked any of them for anything. That is what I keep returning to. Not one person in that room had to explain themselves, produce a card, sign a sheet, state a purpose or buy a beverage. You walk in and it is 74 degrees. The branch manager described the whole program to a reporter from this paper in one sentence: there is no form.
I have written for years about what this neighborhood lacks, usually meaning shade, or a plaza, or a place for teenagers to be that isn’t a parking structure. Last week clarified the category for me. What we are short of is not amenities. It is unconditional interior space — rooms you may occupy simply by being a person who is in the neighborhood.
We have almost stopped building them. The recreation centers, the senior center, the branch libraries: that is the list, and every item on it was built by a previous generation, most of them in a stretch between 1920 and 1970 when this seemed like an obvious thing for a city to do with money. Since then we have built a great deal of privately owned publicly accessible space, which is a phrase that should be read slowly. It is space you may enter until somebody decides you may not.
I am aware of the argument that a library should not be a cooling center — that we are asking a book collection to absorb a housing failure, a health failure and a climate failure, and that this is not fair to librarians. It is not fair to librarians. It is also nothing new; the branch has been absorbing whatever the block could not handle since the Depression, and the people who work there will tell you, with some exasperation, that the absorbing is the job and always has been.
What is new is that we spent nineteen months finding out what happens without it. The room was closed for its retrofit. People did homework on the front steps because the Wi-Fi reached the sidewalk. A folding table in the lobby lent books.
The room is back. There is a bond on the ballot in November that would pay to keep rooms like it standing through an earthquake, and it cannot, by law, buy a single additional hour of the room being open. Both of those sentences are true and the second one is not an argument for voting no.
Vote for the building. Then come to the June budget hearing, where we argue about the hours, and bring somebody who was asleep in a chair last Tuesday.