Friday, April 11, 2008

A Place of Neighborhood Vitality May Be in Budget Cutters’ Sights - New York Times:

For many middle-class New Yorkers, these kinds of pleasures are a big part of what the boom years have brought them: not second homes or personal Pilates instructors or Kelly bags, but urban utopian luxuries like fanciful playgrounds, open-air free movies and library services good enough to make them weekend highlights. All of those services, financed by tax dollars, have the added benefit of throwing people together, and none more effectively than libraries — free, local, with room to roam, they’re like parks with a brain, providing education brilliantly disguised as leisure, ideally on the weekends, when most people have time for it.

2:12 PM