If artists’ renditions are any guide, it looks like the new downtown library is going to be a great place to, among many other things (read, for example), hang out. Now, $185 million may sound like a lot of simoleons to devote to a hang-out joint, but it’s not, really.

Groundbreaking on the new downtown library is today.

^{Courtesy photo}

Okay, “hang-out joint” is a bit flip. But one of the most important functions of this to-be-sparkling addition to our city is that it will serve as a public space, a place where people gather to talk, to listen, to rub elbows…to hang out.

There are all kinds of reasons why citizens don’t interact with each other any more – the decline of mass transit, say, and the explosion of cocoon-enabling electronic anesthesia – and the result has been a comity-shattering disconnect. We don’t understand what the hell the guy on the other side of town is so worked up about, don’t empathize with those idiot letters-to-the-editor writers and insane-clown posters because we simply don’t see them. This is fairly new; this is not the way things used to be. The opening page of E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, set in the early 1900s, describe a way of life just three or four generations back that sounds to the 21st century ear like an ethnographer’s report of life in another galaxy:

“The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another. That was the style, that was the way people lived.”

The crowd gathered for the library groundbreaking.

^{Photo by Heather Back}

One of the most telling statistics I’ve ever come across noted that in the late 1940s, most alcohol – I think it was something like 70 percent – was consumed in bars and restaurants. By the 1980s, around 70 percent was consumed in the home. Fewer fistfights, no doubt (fewer public fistfights, anyway), but a lot less contact with strangers. And a lot less walking in his moccasins, Doc Martens or loafers; her pumps, flats, or stilettos.

So yeah, we need a new library for all the usual, and very good and compelling reasons. But when construction officially begins today, we’ll be doing more than expanding shelf space, providing more computer terminals, and supporting and encouraging our intellectual community. We’ll be breathing life into the civilization. We’re paying a pretty small price for it, too. And it’ll pay off in spades. Not to mention hearts.

And minds.

Two thoughts that just plain didn’t fit anywhere, so they gotta go at the end, and in italics:

1) Before, during, and for a while after the 81 games the Padres play at Petco, it’s damn near impossible to park anywhere near the site of what will be the new library. That’s nearly one day/evening out of four. This will be a huge inconvenience for a lot of would-be librarypatrons/hanger-outers.

And,

2) Five’ll get you 10– no, five’ll get you 20 – that most people in favor of a new stadium for the Chargers oppose the new library. And vice versa.