The North Hills branch of the Queens Library is at 57-04 Marathon Parkway. The neighborhood is called Little Neck on the QBPL website, which is debatable; when I plug the address in google maps the neighborhood is denoted as Flushing (completely wrong).
Calling up Little Neck on google maps delineates a wide area, which includes the Queens Farm Museum (its website puts it in Floral Park) and LIJ Medical Center (which calls its location New Hyde Park), as well as QBPL at Glen Okas (which is next to the Bellerose Temple). All these definitions are fluid.
It is an interesting looking library:
Inside, it looks small. When I went in, the place was crowded. It was a quarter of three; school was out, and quite a few kids from PS 221, up the block from the library, were inside. Not all of them were doing school work all the time — what a shock. At least they were in the library, and kids who go to the library get to schoolwork after fooling around for a while. These days that involves looking at You Tube videos; in my school days we found other ways to fool around and waste a little time and use up energy. Technology has changed; kids haven't, much.
This neighborhood, as many others in the northeast corridor of Queens, has a large Korean presence.
In the far corner there's a teen nook; off to the side there's a children's area; in the middle there are several computers. This is the model common to all libraries I've visited thus far.
Because of its building's shape, the arrangement is slightly different in North Hills branch.
From North Hills I drove a short distance, using back roads I know quite well, to the Windsor Park branch of QBPL. This building, located at 79-50 Bell Boulevard, was constructed in 1973. The neighborhood is Oakland Gardens, which itself is considered by some to be part of Bayside. The name Windsor Park probably comes from the housing development nearby. Surely such naming conventions, with overlaps and contradictions, are common beyond the borders of the fair borough of Queens.
Its design is ingenious: one walks into a ground-level floor, but soon must go either upstairs to the adult and teen area, or downstairs to Children's. There is a Customer Service desk on that main landing (good placement, if a bit isolating). In effect there are three floors (aside from that service desk, the rest of the main level is given to staff offices and such). Windsor Park is only a fifth larger than the North Hills branch, yet its space utilization makes it seems far larger.
The adult and teen areas are upstairs.
The dynamics of the neighborhood population surely play a significant role in how the library is planned, and how it is used years after it was built. As is the case in Bellerose, the demographics can change significantly (in fact, demographic change in all of NYC has been significant over the last quarter century, and longer, for New York City is ever-changing).
The 1970s was a time of tight budgets for New York, and that might well have had an impact on how libraries were planned. I don't know, and it will take significant research and time to ascertain, far more than I intend to devote to such topics in this blog. However, I might find myself doing intensive research at some point, and will gain insight into that.
I watched Back to the Future that night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. As always.