There is a drive-through book drop here.
You pull up, put the books in, and drive away. No parking, no walking across a lot, no wrangling a child out of a car seat to return three picture books.
That is the kind of detail that decides whether a family uses a library once a month or once a week, and it is the first thing a regular mentions about this branch.
What is North Community Library?
A branch of the St. Petersburg Public Library System at 861 70th Avenue North, in the northern part of the city. The phone is 727-893-7214 and the site is splibraries.org. One hundred and forty-five Google reviews at four point five.
It is a smaller branch and nobody pretends otherwise. What it has is a good nice selection across the categories, orderly stacks, a bright and inviting room, plenty of tables for studying, and staff that regulars call personable.
Holds are the operating model. Place a request online through the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative, get a notification, collect it here, and drop it back through the window. A regular described the hold process as simple and the drive-through drop as convenient in the same sentence, which together is the whole case for a neighbourhood branch.
The architecture gets a mention too, described as fun, especially around the computer room.
The display shelf
One reviewer singled out something most people walk past: the on-display recommendations, which they described as great and said they were pleasantly surprised by.
That is staff work and it is the most undervalued service in a small library.
A large branch has everything and therefore recommends nothing. A small branch cannot compete on collection size, so the useful thing it can do is put twenty books on a table with their covers facing out because somebody who works there thought you might like them.
If you have ever left a library with a book you did not know existed, a display shelf is usually why. It is the same instinct as a bookseller’s staff picks table, and in a branch this size it is the main event.
Children and the park next door
The branch is described as kid-centric, with a nice selection of children’s books and the sort of atmosphere where a family is not a nuisance.
Next door there is a park with picnic tables, which one visitor flagged as making this a good outing with children instead of just an errand.
That pairing matters more than it sounds. A library visit with small children has a natural time limit, usually about twenty minutes before somebody needs to move. A park attached to the visit turns twenty minutes into two hours and makes the trip worth the drive.
West St. Petersburg solves the same problem by putting a fenced playground in its own lot.
What a writer gets from it
Tables and quiet in a room that is rarely full.
Neighbourhood branches are consistently the best free working spaces in any county, for the simple reason that nobody goes to one at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday. Bright room, orderly stacks, plenty of tables, and no expectation that you buy anything.
The two late nights are Tuesday and Thursday, both until eight. The rest of the week closes at six.
Beyond the room, the service to use is the hold system. Anything the county holds can be routed here, which means a branch this size functions as a collection point for a collection of several hundred thousand items. That is the modern argument for small branches and it is a good one.
For getting your own book into the county’s collection, the piece on Pinellas library shelves explains how selectors buy.
Hours and getting there
Monday, Wednesday and Friday from ten in the morning until six. Tuesday and Thursday ten until eight. Saturday ten until six. Closed Sunday.
Six days with two late nights and a full Saturday.
70th Avenue North is in north St. Petersburg, with the library’s own lot and the drive-through drop. From Clearwater it is about twenty minutes, from downtown St. Petersburg ten.
It sits close to Feed Your Imagination Comics on Central Avenue if you are making a loop of it, though that is west of here, not north.
Where it sits
The St. Petersburg branches each solve a different problem.
The Obama Main Library is where the collection runs deepest and the doors open every day. Mirror Lake is the 1915 Carnegie building downtown. West St. Petersburg starts at eight and has the playground.
North Community is the convenient one. Drive-through drop, easy holds, tables that are usually free, a display shelf worth looking at, and a park next door. For anybody living in the north of the city it is the branch you would use without thinking about it, which is exactly what a neighbourhood library should be.
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