This was my favorite library growing up in Flemington, New Jersey. (It’s still there, but it was my favorite as a kid.) It’s in Readington Township, in the small town of Whitehouse Station, a 10-minute scenic drive from my parents’ house.

You can probably guess what it used to be pretty easily, because these buildings were once ubiquitous, and quite often looked pretty much just like this.

If you don’t know, this picture should give it away. The restaurant in front of the library here was once a hotel. A small town of about 1,000 people, rather in the middle of nowhere, had a train station and a hotel. The streetscape is the same, something like a century later, but the economics underlying it are totally different. But at least the streetscape did survive.

What’s nice here is that the building has been left largely intact inside. It’s small, but it has lots of rooms—nooks and crannies—and it’s incredibly sturdy and well insulated from the sound of cars on Main Street. Walking in there is like walking into an old urban church. You can almost feel the silence, like something exuded from those durable old walls.

Even the old benches are still there, covered, as they have been for decades, in boxes of books.

It’s like a time capsule, walking into that library and seeing it exactly as I did when I was six or seven years old. The only difference is the newer book titles, and the modern computer (there also used to be a dot matrix printer!) For all I write about favoring new development, which I generally do, I like this kind of continuity too, and I think it should be preserved where it can.

Given how many train stations there used to be, and how few of them are still operating as such, there are a lot of conversions out there. Do you know of any neat ones? Leave a comment!

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