Butchered Literature
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #159
This was temporary, but I really wish it were permanent:
Yes, even the freezer cases!
Here’s the article these screenshots are from:
When locals head to the former Merchants’ Square supermarket in Carmel, Indiana, they’re not stocking up on groceries. Instead, they’re there to check out books from the temporarily relocated Carmel Clay Public Library (CCPL), which has ingeniously repurposed the vacant store space to house their collection while their main branch is under renovation.
When they first started planning for their two-year renovation process, library staff struggled to find a temporary location with enough space for both their collection and their operations staff. The empty grocery store turned out to be the ideal solution: its large footprint could accommodate the library’s space needs, plus it boasts a central location in town and plenty of public parking. So after three years of sitting vacant, the underutilized building has become the Merchants’ Square Main Library.
Here’s that supermarket property, an utterly standard big-box supermarket in a strip plaza:
All of the Google imagery is from before the library took it over. It appears to still (or again) be vacant.
A commenter on Reddit wrote:
Grand Haven, Michigan did this temporarily about ten years ago when they rebuilt their library. Around the time they went to rebuild the save a lot closed so they moved all the library they could into it. Worked a treat!
The other comments are split between “that’s cool!” and “that’s weird/creepy.”
I like it. I’m sort of stuck between thinking this big, bland kind of retail footprint is inherently bland, and wondering whether we can find ways to use it that are more delightful and engaging and resourceful.
We have so much of this empty space, and a lot of it is never going to get filled again by typical chain stores. What’s so bad about this really? Is it better to not have a library at all? Can’t we think of empty big-box stores as basically very cheap platforms for all sorts of businesses and services?
Yes, there is a certain weirdness or liminality to this. When I see a church or medical office or some other non-standard use of an old strip plaza space, my first thought is always that’s a strip mall! Is that something inherent in the form? Or is it our expectation that this sort of space has a very narrow range of uses?
What are some fun/odd/resourceful non-typical uses of retail space you know of?
Related Reading:
“Excuse Me, Where’s the Car Aisle?”
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In St. Louis there’s a library branch in a strip mall like this. Most of the mall is vacant right now, but the library has been there for a while. I think it’s the marketplace branch of SLPL.
I forget the exact sequence of events, but there was an abandoned store in my hometown in the early 1990s (like an old 5 and 10 or grocery). Our library used the space as a temporary branch while the main library was renovated and expanded, and then I think Dollar General took over the space afterwards. But it also could have been Dollar General first, then later the library. The library was there less than a year, but it was still pretty cool!