Bergina Francois and her sister, Kercofa, were sitting in the Benny's on Broad Street in Providence Monday afternoon.

Wait a minute. It used to be the Benny's on Broad Street. Now, it's the library. Well, it's sort of the library. It's got a few books, a few computers, a floor fan or two to deal with the summer muggies.

But it just doesn't have that library feel. It doesn't have the worked-in smells of old paper and paste and polished wood. It has the feel of a place where people used to buy auto parts and lawn chairs. It's makeshift to the extreme. It's a patronizing crumb tossed to the neighborhood.

Just down Broad Street is the place the Francois sisters used to go for their books and their real library experience. It is the Washington Park Library. It is old and has all the right smells. There is no mistaking it for something else. It is a place meant for reading and studying and sharing quiet space with neighbors. The sisters have been going there for their books for as long as they can remember.

But they can't anymore. Now, there are leaks in the ceiling and crumbling eaves and workers from the Providence Public Library hauling out the books and equipment ahead of more leaks and crumbles. There are signs that warn "Danger: Falling Material."

The fine old library has been put on the slow track to derelict status. It has been allowed to deteriorate to the point where it is too expensive to fix up. It has been closed as part of a severe library cost-cutting program.

"I'm mad," says Kercofa Francois, a student at Wheeler School. "They acted like they didn't know about the roof when they clearly did."

That's the problem people in Washington Park have with this insulting civic failure. This is their library, the place where kids went after school and friends met and people could take the slow walk of discovery among the stacks.

And little was done to preserve it.

"Ten years ago, the roof started to leak," says Ellen Schwartz, who lives a couple of blocks away. "It would have cost about $5,000 then. But they never tried to save it."

Schwartz was a volunteer tutor at the library, helping kids with their homework. She says it was the social center of a neighborhood where there is little in the way of coffee shops and other places where people can meet and catch up. She says a similar fate would never have been allowed for the Rochambeau Library on Providence's East Side.

That's a pretty safe bet. And the sad thing is, the library in Washington Park was a more vital part of its community simply because there is so little around it that offers the same quiet, thoughtful refuge.

Kas DeCarvalho, a lawyer who lives near the library, says it was a central location where kids could go in the crucial hours between the end of school and the time their parents came home from work.

"The kids don't have a haven anymore," says DeCarvalho, who is runnning for City Council. "They're on the streets.

"Everyone in Washington Park knew this was a place you could go and be safe."

No one can go there now and be safe because something might fall on them. And, of course, it's been closed down because it's in such bad shape. And it's in such bad shape because no one prevented it from becoming that way.

It's a hard lesson for some kids in Providence: opportunity can sometimes depend on the street where you live.

As many as 90 kids used to go to the Washington Park Library in the afternoon. Down at what is derisively called the "Benny's Library," attendance barely hits double figures.

bkerr@projo.com / (401) 277-7252