THE WEB GROWS IN BROOKLYN

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

It was last fall that the Microsoft advancemen first visited the little library in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. They came down Flatbush Avenue, past the tropical-colored stalls of mangoes and plantains, past the discount-clothing stores, past the men slapping down dominoes on chipped stoops. They did not dally at the basketball hoop lashed to a tree in front of the library. Unlike some of the kids who played there every day, the Microsoft guys actually went up the steps and inside.

They had come to see whether the Flatbush branch of the Brooklyn Public Library ought to share in a $3 million grant that would wire it to the Internet. Donald Kaplan, who works for the library system, recalls that the emissaries from Redmond, Washington, were dubious: "One of them asked, 'Will this be like the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, where a Coke bottle falls out of the sky and no one knows what to do with it?'" Kaplan shrugged off the gibe, saying, "No, it'll be like the movie Field of Dreams--build it, and they will come."

Which is what happened. They came on that opening day in April, and they haven't stopped coming. Nearly 8,000 people in 3 1/2 months signed up for half-hour sessions on the computers. So many folks wait for the library doors to open each morning--children as young as two, adults older than Bill Gates' parents--that the staff had to put down green tape on the floor to mark off a place to line up for a turn on one of the dozen Pentium-chip computers in the Jell-O-blue reading room.

"When we started doing sign-ups, it got a little hairy," says Donna Hubbard, the branch librarian. Arguments sometimes broke out. It's obvious why, she says. Half the patrons are children dying for a chance on the machines. "Most of them don't have PCs," says Hubbard. Many of the local schools don't either.

Flatbush has always been a neighborhood of strivers, a place where one wave of immigrants washes over another. And the library has always been central to their dreams--a haven where that critical ingredient to success, information, is dispensed for free. But now, as the millennium approaches and more knowledge comes down a wire than anyone could ever acquire from books, many people behave as if equipping libraries to serve the info-poor is some kind of novelty.

"I come in here almost every day to cruise the Net," says Clifford Granthier, 20. The young Haitian immigrant was among those who used to spend all day on the makeshift basketball court outside the reading room. But as word trickled out that you could find cool pictures of Michael Jordan and the Bulls on the Web, Granthier began spending more and more of his day in cyberspace. His circumnavigations led him to a new interest: desktop publishing. "I'm inspired to start my own business," he says.

But how? He doesn't have enough money even to buy a machine. Easy, says Granthier. He's building his own PC, one component at a time. "I found a site on the Net that shows you how to make one."

Who says the gods are crazy?

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