Bookworms Abuzz Over City’s New Library

Eight-year-old Vivian Shen couldn’t have been happier if it had been raining Barbies.

With a copy of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” under her arm, the grinning third-grader began to spin and hop. Why wouldn’t she be ecstatic? She had just gotten her first library card, at the new library in Agoura Hills.

While nearby Calabasas dithers, Agoura Hills has completed its new $10-million civic center, which includes the library. The process took just three years, from obtaining the 3.25-acre site off Ladyface Circle to last month’s grand opening.

Although the library is a scaled-down version of the regional facility that the Conejo Valley city once hoped for, it’s a jewel in its own right, its fans say. And its fans appear to be many.

On opening day, residents of the community of 22,000 checked out 2,000 books. And 110 people requested library cards, as many as signed up at the old library in a typical month, according to director Raya Saji.

In the view of former library director Sy Rimer, who served on the design committee, “It’s as near to perfection as I can conceive.”

Even before Agoura Hills incorporated in 1982, local bibliophiles had begun campaigning for a new library to replace the leaky concrete-block building on Roadside Drive. When Rimer became librarian in 1972, the 7,500-square-foot facility “had a hitching post, and people still came to the library on horseback in some cases,” he recalled.

But the now-30-year-old building held only 35,000 volumes, and prospective borrowers were discouraged by the lack of parking. Moreover, Rimer said, you took your life into your hands when pulling out onto Roadside Drive, which runs alongside the Ventura Freeway.

“You have to have seen the old one to appreciate this one,” Saji said of the new library at 29901 Ladyface Court, which shares the civic center with City Hall. A new council chamber sits in the center of the complex under a cupola, and there is also a community meeting room.

Tucked amid the live oaks at the foot of Ladyface Mountain, the Craftsman-style library, at 17,000 square feet, is more than twice the size of the old and has three times the parking (92 spaces). It also has room for 100,000 volumes, three times the number the old facility could accommodate.

Owned by the city, the library operates as a branch of the Los Angeles County Public Library. And bucking the national trend, it is open every day but Sunday, with evening hours Monday through Wednesday.

Thoroughly wired, the library has 25 computers, several with Internet access, and other high-tech features. But its ambience is that of a Craftsman-style home, one with lots and lots of books, videotapes and periodicals. In the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement, the center has a shingle roof, wooden eaves and stone posts--a dramatic departure from the stucco-and-terra-cotta Southwestern style so popular in Southern California.

“The design committee just sort of fell in love with the idea of Craftsman,” said architect Charles Walton of Charles Walton and Associates in Glendale.

Committee member Diane Haupt, who with her husband, Eric, has led the Friends of the Library since the 1980s, agreed.

“We didn’t want it to feel like an edifice,” she said. “We wanted to really make it feel homey.”

Its coziness is evident as soon as you enter the library. Behind a curved wall of stained glass is the Friends of the Library’s reading room. It has a fireplace with gas jets, and Stickley chairs and tables--genuine, new L. & J.G. Stickley furniture.

The Friends raised more than $360,000 for the furnishings and other amenities, including an original mural of the Santa Monica Mountains and its animals in the extensive children’s section.

“I wanted something residential,” said Louise Rishoff, the Agoura Hills councilwoman who many say spearheaded the project. “We wanted it to be a place where people would stay, not just come and obtain materials,” said Rishoff, a member of the design committee. “We wanted it to be a gathering place.”

To ensure that the library would be welcoming, the committee put tables and chairs around the perimeter so visitors could gaze out the windows at the treetops. And tables are lighted by lamps, “not neon tubes,” Rishoff said. Look into the library at night, she said, and it seems to glow.

Assistant City Manager Greg Ramirez, who was project director, said he thought the committee made good use of its money. For all the complex’s high-end touches, “We didn’t spend a lot of money on things like . . . marble,” he said. The material in the plaza in front of the center looks like slate but is actually stamped concrete. And what appears to be wood flooring in the community room and parts of City Hall is a durable, easy-to-clean linoleum product made from recycled rubber and other materials.

Ramirez said he thinks one reason the project was completed efficiently was that the four-person design committee was small enough to keep things moving forward but that a wide swath of the community was also involved. He explained that the architect held a weeklong “design camp” for “everybody and anybody. They could bring their dog if they wanted to and have their input.”

The camp was held on the site, and, as the public made suggestions, Walton incorporated them into sketches on the spot.

One result was to move the children’s section, which takes up a third of the library, to the rear.

Children can be noisy, Rishoff noted, “and we didn’t want them to be shushed.” Putting the children’s section at the rear also meant that the children would have to traverse the entire library to get to their computers and precious picture and “chapter” books, which lie around a corner.

“It’s this wonderful surprise for them at the end of the road,” said Rishoff of the children’s section, which includes storytelling gazebos with padded benches and bathrooms with pint-sized plumbing.

Rishoff was present more than a decade ago when Agoura Hills and its neighbors talked about building a single regional county library, to be located in Agoura Hills.

That plan was quickly scuttled. “It became clear fairly quickly that Calabasas wanted their own library in their own city and the same with Westlake Village,” she said.

The desire to control its destiny that led each of these communities to incorporate was part of the problem, she said. As a result, all three cities soon will have major new libraries within a five-mile radius--as will nearby Oak Park, in Ventura County.

But Rishoff doesn’t care to dwell on the past.

“Our library is so beautiful, we’re still over the moon about what we have, and I wouldn’t want to go back and revisit what-ifs,” she said. “Sitting in a comfortable chair with a nice lamp beside you and a book in your lap--how much better does it get?”