Bookworm Sanctuaries

Although the Hyde Park branch is one of the city's newest, it evokes the past as well, carrying the name of Miriam Matthews, the city's first African-American librarian, a historian who assembled an extensive collection of materials on black Californians.

If Hyde Park is the city's best new library, another branch, just a mile away and not too far from USC, stands out as the best renovated library in South Los Angeles. The Vermont Square Branch Library, named for the neighborhood that surrounds it, is one of the city's oldest and tiniest branches. Yet it has a sense of grandeur, in part because it sits in an open community square in a neighborhood filled with century-old Craftsman bungalows.

The Vermont Square Library was designed in the Italian Renaissance style by Sumner P. Hunt — an architect known for his work on the Southwest Museum of the American Indian and the Doheny Mansion. Hunt's involvement may explain the library's classic, early-20th-century look. With cream-colored brickwork, a grand, arched entry and white marble in the lobby, the branch looks like a place where Atticus Finch would have gone on a Saturday afternoon to catch up on his reading.

While the wood surfaces in the Hyde Park branch are made of shiny, recycled lumber, the Vermont Square Library bears a crisscross pattern of oak ceiling beams, with skylights interspersed between them.

The city actually got the Vermont Square branch for free, since it was paid for by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, whose foundation funded nearly 3,000 libraries around the globe. When the library opened in 1913, a streetcar ran immediately behind it on tracks that ran parallel to nearby 48th Street.

That the Vermont Square branch still stands is a small marvel. It was shuttered in 1990, following an order from building inspectors worried about earthquake safety. But it was repaired and reopened six years later, its appearance nearly unchanged because of fervent pleas for its return by the surrounding community.

Hyde Park Miriam Matthews Library  2205 Florence Ave., L.A., (323) 750-7241

Vermont Square branch library  1201 W. 48th St., L.A., (323) 290-7405