Yesterday, I took the boys to the local library to do their homework to break up the kitchen table routine. On the way there, the kids said that they needed a snack first, so I drove to the Wendy's, which is smack in the center of the town. I ordered some ice teas and frosties for the kids, and a Caesar side salad for myself. The boys ate their mysterious white gloop and watched one of the five large screen TVs, and Jonah swiped my salad. Growth spurt on the horizon.
Since it was three in the afternoon, the usual hungry families coming back from basketball practice weren't there. The other customers were old men sitting by themselves drinking coffee. The windows of Wendy's provided a nearly 360 view of our snow covered town. It was oddly beautiful.
At the library, Jonah ran upstairs to the teen floor to work on his math. Ian and I stayed on the kiddie floor and did math problems. Jonah's best friend and his mom came in to pick up a book on the Holocaust for Hebrew school, and we chatted briefly.
With the horrid weather this winter, we've all been entombed in our homes. I don't think I've seen my neighbors in weeks. I promised Jonah that we would go back to the library again tomorrow.
It would be nice if there was a place, a building, a facility that provided a place for the old men to drink coffee and watch TV, where the kids could do their homework, where the old men and the kids were mixed up a bit, where a daycare could operate next to a senior center and a cooking class.
YMCAs provide that mixed-up community life. Ian takes a swim class at a Y twenty minutes away, and I'm continually impressed with their acceptance of kids with special needs. I just wish that there were more of these organizations, and they were more widely used. Those old men in Wendy's need some place to go.
Apt. 11d 
Those old men in Wendy’s need some place to go.
Maybe, but things like the Y often don’t work so well for grown men anymore. They’ll say something completely ordinary for 1953, but hugely homophobic or whatever for 2011. The mothers of younger kids and the staff will start to complain. The 25 year-old manager will try to smooth things over and wind up acting out the script he used, in his own mind only, to enlightened his least couth uncle. Because he’s pretty sure these guys aren’t armed and are currently sober, he’s willing to say it out loud now. This little bit of catharsis gets half of them to leave. Some chirpy busybody with too much time will chase the rest of them away by pestering them to take an exercise class or replacing the donuts with a veggie tray.
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They do have a place to go, the Wendy’s, which you said was oddly beautiful. I think we have to get past the idea that some things (McDonalds, Wendy’s, Starbucks, or whatever) are bad, and see what they’re used for. If old men with coffee can hang out at Wendys’, and Wendy’s can afford to let them, we have a solution that works, even if we’d prefer a hip little bookstore cafe (which I’d like better, but might fail).
I am a big big fan of physical libraries, though, and I think we need to keep them open as community spaces. This is going to be even more true as bookstores keep dying and as even more library users start using digital formats for their books.
We have a nearby community center, which could, and has tried to become more of a place to hang out. Its flaw is that it’s not easily walkable (because of our hilly neighborhood) and it lacks food. I think that hangouts need to have a place to buy food. I wish there was some way to get a coffee shop to move into the location, but, there we run into the public/private partnership problem using public space for a private enterprise. And, since the area is a former army base, all the land is public, unamenable to private development.
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we run into the public/private partnership problem using public space for a private enterprise
There is a private coffee shop in the public library by my office.
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When I did my $5.99 an hour page job at MH’s library years 9 years ago, they were talking about putting in a cafe. They had already put in wonderful leather armchairs and had vast supplies of every new bestseller.
I like Starbucks and I like fast food indoor playgrounds like the ones at McDonald’s and Chik-fil-a. If you could combine the two concepts, I would never leave (which is probably one of the reasons nobody has done it yet).
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There’s also the fear-of-pervert factor. Any adult man who seems interested in kids in public places may be subject to unfriendly attention. As a related issue, I personally am not very excited about going to the downtown library (our closest public option) with my kids because it is a sort of heated and air conditioned daytime shelter for derelicts, and I feel like I need to keep a pretty close eye on the kids when I’m there.
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My mom worked at the downtown library in her town. They had an unarmed security guard constantly patrolling the stacks and booting anybody who wasn’t at least putting up a show of using the collection. All the homeless people sat down, but couldn’t close their eyes or drop the book.
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But, the Pittsburgh library in Oakland is great. Coffee, free wifi with a valid library card, and it is just across the plaza from the real library.
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“YMCAs provide that mixed-up community life.”
The girl’s school is located in a downtown Jewish Community Centre that also has seniors and their programs, a daycare, theatre, a coffee place, and a gym. It’s also on the edge of a large university so there are lots of academics and students in the neighbourhood too. Plus the couple of homeless people who raid our recycle box on recycle day every week. That “mixed up community life” is one of the many reasons that we chose that school for her. And also chose this neighbourhood.
A neighbourhood about 5 minutes away enjoyed a wonderful transformation a couple of years ago. Some bus barns from the 1910’s and ’20’s were renovated into a building with live/work studios for artists, a children’s theatre, a community food bank, a dog park, a playground, and a nursery/kindergarten. It transformed the ‘hood and became it’s centre. It also has the best farmer’s market in the city as well. All of the above draw people on foot out of their homes to mix at least once a week.
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That sounds awesome, Sandra. Whenever I start to gripe about the lack of community space, I remind myself that it won’t improve until my friends and I start using it more. I’m trying to be better about investigating classes at the Y or Rec Center before signing up for some fancy private gig.
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Okay, I get my paycheck from the wonder association you speak about. Our lobby is often filled with kids doing homework, seniors drinking coffee and moms waiting for swim lessons to be done. Members and non-members alike. As we say “we’re more than a gym and swim.”
No tv in the lobby, but hit a treadmill and you’ll find a bunch. 🙂
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