A Love Letter to the Central Library

A Love Letter to the Central Library
Through Life’s Changes, the Downtown Landmark Remains
LA Downtown News: 11.23.2011 by Anne Marie Ruff

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - I love the Central Library. For almost two decades and through many life changes, the library has been a constant, like a good friend.

Obviously I’m not alone — this resplendent repository of art, literature and knowledge thrives on the multiplicity of people who pass through the doors and partake of what the library has to offer. I’m just one of many for whom the Downtown building has an inexorable hold.

I first met the Central Library when I was attending UCLA. Back in the days when the card catalog had just graduated to a computer, the Central Library offered books for my research papers not to be found in the URL (the decidedly un-cyber University Research Library). I found in the long block between Grand Avenue and Flower Street a safe place in an otherwise intimidating Downtown.

I know I am not alone in my passion for this place. Every day I see dozens of people, many marginalized or nearly discarded by the rest of the city, who eagerly await the opening of the library doors. In its rich rooms and elegant halls, they find refuge, rest, and who knows, maybe even help with their reading or computer skills.

More recently, I have been thrilled to know the library in yet another way. I provided two copies of my first novel — some of which was written within its walls — to the library’s fiction department. So now not only is the library part of me, but I am part of the library. READ MORE !

Anne Marie Ruff’s recently published first novel, Through These Veins, chronicles the development of a fictional cure for AIDS. All profits benefit Doctors Without Borders and the Ethiopian Institute for the Conservation of Biodiversity.