By Corey Kilgannon, City Room @ nytimes.com, Jan 22, 2013

After one visit, she returned with her hair in dreadlocks. Another time, her long blonde locks were primly fashioned into a traditional bun. One day, she came back wearing a uniform of the exclusive Brearley School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

These have been the many phases of Kirsten Larson, an American Girl doll who was sitting on a shelf in the East Village library until a resourceful children’s librarian began lending her to girls — many of whose parents, because of financial or feminist reasons, resist buying the dolls.

Kirsten — who retails for $110 and is marketed as a “pioneer girl of strength and spirit” leading an adventurous life in the mid-1800s — was dropped off a decade ago in the Gothic building on Second Avenue.

She could not have been more out of her element, in her homespun frock and bonnet, in the middle of a neighborhood once known for punk rock, left-wing activism and on-the-edge art and fashion, and now for its rapid gentrification.

But Kirsten has adapted to her urban frontier, traveling from one girl’s home to another’s for two weeks at a time [....]