The Learning Village - Las Vegas

At last something new in Las Vegas to be excited about - the Learning Village on Fremont Street, a collection of portable classrooms with a nice little wrought iron gate at the entrance.

First let me say that Las Vegas has the BEST library system anywhere. I grew up in a small town that had a fantastic library. It was in an old colonial mansion with huge white columns, a wide staircase entrance and creaky wooden floors that made you tiptoe. It sat in the middle of a lush green, city block square, park with an ice rink, a flagstone fish pond, a lapidary museum and a botanical conservatory. In Las Vegas, when people ask if I've seen the conservatory at the Bellagio at Christmas, I roll my eyes and say - so what are bunch of zinnias or chrysanthemums. In a town of 40,000 we actually did beautiful, but that's another story.

Las Vegas, despite the local mentality that says everything - including the movie theaters - has to be in a casino, has an amazing library system. While the libraries, and there are more than a dozen, may not be in the middle of a perfectly landscaped park, the buildings are architecturally interesting with theaters, an art museum at one, a children's museum at another, atriums, computer labs, meeting rooms in every size for whatever the group might be, and great staffs. There is always something going on.  However, despite the great libraries, this town, with a population of two million, has been missing a community based "learning center." We finally have one.

It's not in some old dilapidated building like Chicago or a run down, former motel like the San Fernando Valley - buildings with character even if it is on the questionable side. It's in portable classrooms, plopped on Fremont Street next to Tin Can City. - (They seriously need to do something about the exterior of that place.)

Yesterday I went to a class at the Learning Village for the first time. I assumed, by the address, that it was at Tin Can City. I wandered around and finally found someone to ask. They pointed to a collection of what appeared to be construction trailers next door. It was exciting to see that there is finally something to bring the community together, but disappointing to see that they had torn down a perfectly good, usable motel, which would have served better, in order to install shipping containers as a "mall" and trailers as the learning village. But there's no accounting for common sense. When they expanded the library in my home town, they slapped an extremely modern, glass addition onto the beautiful old colonial mansion.

But no matter how unappealing the buildings are, Las Vegas finally has the Learning Village, something I have been whining about needing for two decades. So it's common, and boring, and ugly and lacks character. At least it's here.