Norma Cruz enjoyed the puppet shows and children’s story times at her local library in Garland years before she had a daughter. The Mexico native wanted to learn reading techniques to help her nieces and nephews after a friend told her that books had helped her baby grow into a gifted student.

But by the time Cruz started her own family, she had moved to Vickery Meadow, a Dallas neighborhood with lots of apartments and immigrants and children — and no library.

Cruz, 38, said she and her daughter had to make do and look for books elsewhere: Half Price Books on Northwest Highway, NorthPark Center, a public library in another neighborhood — anywhere they could go without a car because they didn’t have one.

But next year, Cruz and her first-grader, Karla, should finally have a long-promised library in their neighborhood. Officials say the library — the 30th branch in the Dallas library system — will be like no other in the city.

The Vickery Meadow branch is set to be one of the city’s most expensive libraries. The price tag is expected to surpass $8 million, a cost covered by bond dollars and a private grant. And city officials say the building will be designed and staffed to serve thousands of people who together speak more than 30 languages and dialects.

Neighbors say the library’s promise can’t be measured in books or dollar signs. Vickery Meadow — once, decades ago, a ritzy enclave for young singles that is now home to hundreds of refugee families and other immigrants — lacks a city community center and amenities sometimes taken for granted elsewhere. The dense area has had trouble with crime near the future library site. And many residents don’t have computers or internet access in their apartments, said nonprofit leaders in the area.

“This neighborhood, it pains me,” Cruz said in Spanish. “The children are always out on the street playing, exposed to all the dangers there. Why not have a place where their parents can take them?”

A group of children play soccer near The Ivy Apartments in October 2014. (Ben Torres / Special Contributor)

A stack of needs

Over the years, Vickery Meadow residents have turned to nonprofits and faith groups to get library-like services such as a computer lab or language lessons.

The Vickery Meadow campus of the nonprofit Literacy Achieves, which teaches English literacy, provides a snapshot of the neighborhood. Executive Director Sarah Papert said about half of the students speak Spanish while the other half speak other languages. Last school year, the nonprofit’s roster contained students from 52 countries.

“It’s not uncommon that one person who is fairly proficient in English will come and bring like 10 people. And so that person is then explaining, and they get it,” Papert said. “People understand the need to learn English, and that that’s very important.”

In recent months, Dallas leaders and the architects hired by the city have been taking inventory of the neighborhood’s unique needs.

Jo Giudice, the city’s library director, said she expects some future Vickery Meadow library patrons won’t be fluent in English. Some might not even know what a library is, she said.

The Vickery Meadow branch will have a staff of 16, compared with eight to 12 people at most branches. Giudice hopes to hire from the neighborhood and cover the most common languages.

Still, communication will require creativity. Giudice said the staff at Vickery Meadow could do what other libraries have done and use online translators and charades to connect with non-English speakers.

“Language is not a barrier to us,” Giudice said. “A smile is universal.”

Martha Stowe, head of the Vickery Meadow Youth Development Foundation, said the needs go beyond language training. She has spotted people sitting outside a McDonald’s trying to get Wi-Fi.

“We have no real gathering place in the neighborhood,” she said.

The vacant 3.6-acre future library site at Park Lane and Ridgecrest Road has been a spot for both hope and trouble over the years as it has informally occupied that town-square role after an apartment complex there was razed eight years ago. During the holiday season, neighbors converge there for the multicultural Festival of Lights. The site has also attracted homeless people and is adjacent to the Five Points intersection, which police have considered a crime hot spot for years.

Charlie Alexander Jr., who is homeless, took a sip of beer on Dec. 12 while his dog King sat by his side on the lot where the future Vickery Meadow library will be built. Alexander picks up the trash that is littered on the lot daily. "Since I am out here I thought, 'Hell ,I will give back,'" he said. (Carly Geraci / Staff Photographer)

In 2017, a Sudanese refugee who’d been evicted from his home was found dead from alcoholism and seizures at an outdoor art gallery on the site.

The city has owned the land for nearly a decade, but the 2008 financial crisis and recession delayed plans to build the library, said City Council member Jennifer Staubach Gates, who has represented the area since 2013. A proposal to fit the library into a mixed-use development didn’t work out financially, she added.

“There’s a lot of frustration that there’s a lack of city planning. ... Hopefully we’re doing better at trying to say, ‘OK, here are the needs,’ and how quickly we can deliver them,” Gates said.

A little over a year ago, Dallas voters approved a $1.05 billion bond package that included $7.7 million for the Vickery Meadow branch. It will also receive $254,000 in park funds for a play area and a $752,000 Crystal Charity Ball grant for the children’s and teens’ sections, Giudice said.

Shaping the library

Architect Robert Meckfessel, president of DSGN Associates, said the library will have a plaza and green space, features that can turn it into the “the heart of the neighborhood.”

The design team has been looking at other cities for inspiration, but at least one aspect of the layout appears settled: The Vickery Meadow branch’s entrance will lead straight to the reading room.

“With most branch libraries now, you walk into a lobby, and there’s some meeting rooms, and then you walk into the library,” said Meckfessel, whose firm has worked on three other Dallas branches. “This one will be different. [Patrons are] going to walk right into the library.”

Giudice, the libraries director, said much of the private grant money secured with the help of the Friends of the Dallas Public Library will fund youth programming that the city wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, such as coding classes. The grant will also pay for equipment for those classes, including iPads, STEM kits and gaming systems.

“I almost get teary thinking about it — that we may hit on something to connect with a child, and they blossom,” Giudice. “It could be just playing a video game brings them out of their shell a little bit, or encourages a love of math. Or a coding class, and all of a sudden we have a computer genius.”

With construction still months away, many other details remain fuzzy. Last month, a photo display framed by colorful ribbons at the library site invited residents to use gold stickers and decorative pebbles to indicate their preferences for features such as meetings rooms, hours of operations and outdoor areas.

Cruz said she took 6-year-old Karla to the ceremonial groundbreaking in December, a couple of years after handing a letter to Gates explaining why the neighborhood needed the library.

The girl was excited to hear from her mother that the library would have a play area and “lots of colors.” Karla wants to be a teacher and hopes to take STEM classes.

Cruz, a stay-at-home mom and folk dancer, said she got goosebumps when she heard about the hundreds of thousands of dollars to enhance the youth sections.

“Kids deserve it,” she said. “They deserve everything.”