Texas town comes up with the best use for an old Walmart

[eridani]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/02/04/1362304/-Texas-town-comes-up-with-the-best-use-for-an-old-Walmart

Walmarts are everywhere. They take up tons of space. Superbowl space. They sell everything, they succeed where mom-and-pop businesses fail—and sometimes, they shut down. What happens when a huge edifice, parking lot, highway exit closes in a place? Well, in McAllen, Texas:

They transformed it into the largest single-floor public library in America.

So very sweet. They've also turned the space into a farmer's market and winter-time indoor shopping and eating. It's a real community use of a space. This has all taken place since 2012 and now:

Within the first month following the opening, new user registration increased by 23%

[niyad]

1. now that is wonderful

[marble falls]

2. I hope more WalMarts buildings become available.

[csziggy]

3. Using empty retail space for needed public spaces is a great idea

Tallahassee Florida didn't have a public library until the late 1950s. When I worked at the public library in the early 70s it was housed in the former Moose club building on three floors in a building not designed for a library. The collections had to be divided among various rooms which made it hard to locate things and hard to re-shelve books (my job). The children's section was in the basement and flooded often. Parking was difficult - there was little on street parking and no parking garage nearby.

A few years after I stopped working there, they moved into former retail space in a declining shopping center. For the first time, they had sufficient space to put the collections in a logical order and to provide meeting areas for the public. Parking was easy. Public library usage bloomed and in a decade there was support for the first time ever to build a facility designed and dedicated as a public library.

Now the county has numerous branch libraries as the main library is overloaded with constant use.

Back to why the capital city of Florida did not have a public library until so recently - Andrew Carnegie offered to build a public library for Tallahassee back in the early 1900s. The powers that be turned it down - Carnegie required that the libraries he donated be open to all and the Tallahassee elite did not want to let the poor and the minorities to have a library. The elite had a subscription library and thought that sufficient.

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. cool. pic of outside

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[eridani]

5. I've never beenf able to post photos from Daily Kos

Links always end in some alphanumeric gibberish instead of jpg or png.