Libraryin'

This is the library my mother took us kids to every week, the Pequot Library in Southport, Connecticut.

Picture's too small to really tell, but the building is totally goth.

It's named for the Pequot Indians, who, as usual before Indians have things named for them, were massacred--well, sort of.

Anyway, this was the library's main desk:

These gas fixtures are still there.

There were (still are) three walk-in fireplaces in the place, and come winter they actually burned wood in them.

But it was really wonderful in the summer. We'd ride to the beach with our books, hang out, then cut over to the library to return same and get new ones. Nobody cared that we were both shoeless and shirtless, or that we tracked sand into the place.

And here, just by way of contrast, is the library I use today:

The main branch of the Denver Public Library.

Not a still from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: just the 4th floor of the DPL.

The storytelling area in the kiddie section of the DPL.

View from the storytelling area of (from left): City and County Building, Civic Center Plaza, big chair, small horse (no, I don't know why).

(Credits: Storytelling area and big chair-small horse pics courtesy me.)

Update: Man I'm an idiot. One should probably read more than a couple of paragraphs of the pieces one links to, or one might find oneself to be very wrong about what such pieces say. The article on the Pequot Massacre, for example, is actually a debunking of same. A friend had to point this out to me. Sentence changed accordingly.