It’s the new hang, where connected kids find a third place of their own
I’m sitting in a refreshingly well-populated auditorium as the Dr. Shirley Linzy Young Artists Orchestra of Las Vegas performs the music of Beethoven, and, for about 10 measures, it provides a distraction-free moment. However, the serenity of ol’ Ludwig Van is rudely thwarted by someone two rows up who is suddenly compelled to record the performance, his screen brightness set to cornea fry. It’s not until some 20 minutes later that a gentleman one row up delivers an exasperated-mom sigh and moves to the end of the row, which shames the amateur videographer into putting his phone down. I could have performed my own ode to joy.
Alas, it’s a rare victory for the anti-gadget set. The most striking thing about Windmill Library — aside from its beckoning, modernist, LEED-certified building design, the lone aesthetic triumph in the architectural wasteland that is the Southwest valley — is its omnipresent tension with technology, a digital/analog balancing act clearly tipped by free Wi-Fi, as I discover during an after-school visit. At first glance, the sight of hardware cohabitating with so many physical books suggests a postmillennial accord. Belying that potential harmony is access — virtual access, that is — and its enabler, the library system itself. To wit: Windmill boasts a free phone-charging station, lest you can’t wrest your slot-reeling eyeballs away from YouTube, which, as one circuit around the library reveals, is the platform du jour of any visible phone screen and more than a few public-use computers. Online video games also populate the desktop lab monitors, and you have to wonder why these kids and their parents even bother slogging through rush-hour gridlock on Rainbow Boulevard to come here.
I know why I’ve always headed to the library: to get things done. But for so many others, it’s devolved into a different place to do the usual. One teen couple has a spread of takeout and Cheetos that would shame a stoner. Another duo cuddles on a cushioned one-seater, free from their parents’ gaze and unconcerned with everyone else’s. Unnerved, I stash my own device to remain on task — and to take full advantage of this space. I still want the library — while hardly the quiet sanctuary on which its cultural reputation was established — to be a place to ply and nourish the brain. Forsaking that in lieu of viral skater wipeouts and rounds of Fortnight seems like wasting this precious resource.
As it turns out, in a town with very little real estate for them, the young lounge lizards of the Windmill branch merely need a location — a third place that doesn’t constantly tempt them to spend money (see: Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Town Square). And libraries need people. They very nearly lost them to the internet, the de facto Central Library of the planet. But in that fight for survival, libraries have become an incredibly versatile emporium of otherness: tax workshops and yarn-weaving classes at Windmill, DJ lessons at the Enterprise branch, and full-scale theatrical productions at the Summerlin Library.
This is all to say that local libraries such as Windmill reasserted their importance by becoming everything to everyone. And ultimately, everyone wins — not least, the institution itself. For decades, the library was the least cool place in town. Now, it’s a hang.
