My Town Monday Series Part 2

I forgot to participate in My Town Monday with Travis last week due to sheer and utter forgetfulness brought on by age and stupidity. So this week I wanted to make sure I prepared myself ahead of time. Here are some fun facts I dug out about Brooklyn:

• Brooklyn was once a separate city. In 1898, it was united with the other four boroughs (Queens, Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island) to form what we now know as the City of Greater New York.
  
• Brooklyn's population of nearly 2.5 million people, would make it the fourth largest city in the U.S. today, if it was its own city.
• Brooklyn is located on the island of Long Island but is not considered part of Long Island.
  
• The Brooklyn Children's Museum is the world's first museum for children.

Today I wanted to take you somewhere that I loved. The Brooklyn public library - the Grand Army Plaza library. If you ever saw the movie Matilda and remember the scene of Matilda walking to the library with her red wagon full of books, then you have a sense of what I was like. The closest library to me was a good fifteen blocks away. If I was lucky, my mother would walk me down once a month and let me stack up with as many books as I could that we would wheel away in her little portable shopping cart. Then we would hit the A&P for some groceries on the way home and maybe buy me a Coke. When she wasn't around, I would walk down myself. I was taking public transportation and walking everywhere since I was 8 years old. I was the quintessential latch key kid.

I wasn't allowed to watch alot of tv and my folks were always working so I spent alot of time reading. It was my gameboy, my playstation, my cable channels - it was all my entertainment. Children these days are so spoiled with all the electronic gadgets and toys out there that they have really lost the pleasure of a good book. Something I have rectified in my own house by being the Big Bad Mommy and banning all electronic devices on school nights. Since my kids just received a Wii as a present from their Aunt, this rule has been a huge sore point in the house. But I am evil, I laugh at their whining, I scoff at their pleas for fairness. It's not fair? I growl, you lazy little ingrates have no idea of what unfair really is. Stinky Mommy they call me.

Anyway, my local library was pretty small, but when I was thirteen, I discovered the central library. My father drove me there when I had to do a book report and all the books I needed were not at my local branch. I remember walking in and being awed at this big beautiful library. The huge, high ceilinged reading rooms and the impressive number of reference librarians. Soon after, I would take the bus and transfer twice to get to the library on my own.

The library is located on Eastern Parkway and Flatbush Avenue and as you can see from the above picture, it is huge. It was built in 1941 and its architecture was created to resemble an open book, with the spine on Grand Army Plaza and the building’s two wings opening like pages onto Eastern Parkway and Flatbush Avenue. Above the door, a lovely inscription that says "When men have wit to read and will to know - the door to learning is the open book."

This was the library that opened up my world to a world of books I never imagined. Science fiction, fantasy, historical novels, regency novels, etc. What my little library had in limited supply were now availabe in endless supply. It was heaven. I spent alot of time there shifting from the first floor reading room to the right of the front doors and the second floor reading rooms depending upon the location of various smelly vagrants that would inhabit comfortable areas of the library. Now don't get me wrong, if I were homeless, I would probably spend all my times at the library also, but I have this thing with my nose. I can't breathe if it stinks. So sitting anywhere near a homeless person would irritate the crap out of me. And there was this one very large homeless person that always sat in the first floor reading room right smack in the middle of the room. When he was there, there wasn't a spot far enough in the room to get away from the wretched smell. Plus, he had or pretended to have Tourrets Syndrome and was prone to shouting out random things like "Gonorrhea!" and "Suck my Dick!" Usually the latter would come out when any female walked by so I wondered how real the Tourrets was. And it didn't matter if the girl walking by was a perky young thing or an 85 year old saggy breasted granny, he wasn't very picky. However, no matter how many times he was escorted it out, he would always be back in a week or two. Quiet for the first hour or so before screaming STD terms and requests for a blowjob would finally send him on his way. Luckily the library was big enough that there was always another reading room far enough I could run away to.

When I started at NYU, I finally found a library that I would love more than Grand Army. NYU's Bobst library is an architectural marvel and the best place to hide and study. A place of windows and cubicles and millions and milions of books. Bobst became my new favorite library, but I never forgot learning how great a library was at Grand Army. Or how annoying a stinky horny homeless man could be.