[Astronaut]

The public library in downtown Seattle is a homeless shelter. It reeks of urine, vomit, and body odor. They are a waste of taxpayer money in the internet age, and an extremely expensive way to warehouse bums.

[Spok]

Libraries, thanks to the so-called civil rights lawyers, have become homeless shelters and pornography dens. It’s no place for children. Now imagine what hospitals will look like when medicine is socialized.

[Veto!]

That new, expensive hideously ugly library in downtown Seattle also reeks of death. I call it “Auschwitz for Books,” as not only is there’s nothing about it conducive to reading, it actually makes books seem rotten. Readers just want to get the hell out ASAP, as the shape of the building, the colors used, the entire aesthetic of the place is terminally ugly. All that empty airspace, so few books. The architects must have been functional illiterates with no respect for books.

I read that they purposely used awful colors in order to make people want to leave. They did this to keep street people away, they say, but those insensitive louts don’t notice. It’s more intelligent visitors to the building who race for the exits.

Seattle’s newer public buildings seem to have been designed by the same design team. The Seattle Art Museum is another paean to empty space, with that huge grand airy stairway leading from the lobby to......ta dum....the coffee shop, the best space in the building.(Endowed perhaps by Howard Whazhisname of Starbucks?) Nice coffee, but then the alleged collections are jammed into dark, low-ceilinged, unappealing spaces. Perhaps the recent remodel effort helped, but I'll wager they created more empty space. At least they don't allow bums in the door.

The old library in San Francisco had hundreds of thousands of books, some of them treasures published early in the 20th century, with several floors of dimly lit stacks with floors made of glass bricks to allow the little bit of light available to filter into every corner. If you could get past the bums sitting like smelly sacks of wet laundry on the steps and in the lobby, the stacks were a wonderland for those who loved knowlege for its own sake. I spent many happy hours lost in those stacks. Eventually, though, the street people won and I joined Mechanics Library, a great little library that kept the bums out. Membership was something like $25 per year. Maybe it's time to give up the notion of "free" public libraries and charge members fees, put up gates, employ ticket takers, and allow those of us who love books to enjoy them in peace. Books online suck, imo. Not even close to the experience of curling up with a good book.