The Library Book Read online

  Many people came to Los Angeles with nothing, expecting everything. Anything free was sought out. The library absorbed these newcomers. Book circulation in the Los Angeles system doubled and then tripled. In 1921, more than three million books were checked out—about a thousand books an hour. On an average day, ten thousand people passed through the library’s doors. Librarians answered two hundred thousand queries a year. Often the reading areas were standing room only. The mix of library patrons was as assorted as the city itself. At the children’s story hour, which was known as Joy Hours for the Wee Folks, “the petted darlings of prosperity rub shoulders with ragged urchins . . . The pampered child of luxury with her nurse comes to read the same stories as the little Russian or Italian girl who brings a grimy baby along to tend,” according to the Times. During lunch hour, businessmen lined up against the walls, elbow to elbow, pinstripes to bow ties, flipping through journals and books.

  A craze for self-improvement and reinvention thrived in this fresh new place conjured out of the scrubby desert. The library was part of that craze, since it offered the tools for fashioning a new self. In 1925, a man named Harry Pidgeon completed a solo sailing trip around the world, becoming only the second person ever to do so. He had gotten the building plans for his boat and most of his nautical knowledge from books he had borrowed from the Los Angeles Public Library. His boat, The Islander, was nicknamed The Library Navigator.

  By then, the library had been operating in Los Angeles for almost forty years, and it reflected and inflected the city and world around it. In the year leading up to Prohibition, when the ban on alcohol seemed inevitable, every book about how to make liquor at home was checked out, and most were never returned. (The run on these books was probably prompted by a Los Angeles Times story, LIBRARY BOOZE BOOKS MAY BE THROWN OUT, which reported that if Prohibition was enacted, all of the guides to home brewing were likely to be destroyed.) The war came, and it found its way into the library, too. In 1917, the American Library Association formed its Library War Council, and Everett Perry was appointed head of the Southwestern Division. The council eventually collected six hundred thousand books to send to American troops overseas. The ALA offered other wartime programming around the country. Vowing to “fight Red delusions,” it designed workshops about the dangers of bolshevism to warn patrons away from unpatriotic thoughts. As part of that effort, Perry directed his librarians to root out any books that “sing the praise of German Kultur.” One librarian reported to him that she’d found the phrase “Kill the English” scrawled inside some German history books. The ALA commended the Los Angeles library for its war programs, especially for helping “Americanize” the city’s many immigrants by encouraging them to read English and take part in library groups. In a newsletter article, the organization congratulated the library for hosting an event at which “a highly cultivated Jewish woman spoke [about] English literature to a large group of her own people . . . and these Jewish people are now busy reading the very cream of American and English literature!” For some reason, the story ended with a list of strange, almost surreal details about the city’s reading habits, such as the fact that Chinese people in Los Angeles were partial to Greek literature, and the city’s firemen liked books about rabbits.

  By this time, the library—and libraries around the country—had become an essential feature of the American landscape, a civic junction, a station in ordinary life. Everyone traveled through the library. In such a place, this crossroads, you might even find someone you had lost. People searching for missing loved ones sometimes scribbled messages in library books with the hope that the person they were looking for would see the message—as if the library had become a public broadcast system, a volley of calls and wished-for responses. Page margins were dappled with penciled pleas tossed into the wide-open sea of the library. “Dear Jennie: Where are you keeping yourself?” said one note written on a page of a book in the Los Angeles library in 1914. “I have searched three cities for you and advertised in vain. Knowing that you like books, I am writing this appeal in every library book I can get hold of in hope that it may come to your eyes. Write to me at the old address, please.”

  No one was quite sure whether this multiplying, spreading stew of a place was really a city. Los Angeles looked nothing like the old cities of the Midwest and the East, and its shape was spun out as if it had been created by centrifugal force rather than emerging from a hard center. The new city was comingled with the old ranchos. There were still orange groves downtown. It was the only major city in the country, and the largest city on the West Coast, without a stand-alone main library building. In 1914, Everett Perry arranged for the library to move out of the high-priced Hamburger Building to a less expensive building nearby, where the library shared space with a pharmacy and a grocery store. It was an awkward fit. In 1921, a bond issue for library construction was put on the city ballot. The campaign in support of it emphasized the humiliation of being a city without typical urban assets, a sore spot in a city that was trying to believe it was actually a city. “Grow Up, Los Angeles!” one pamphlet said. “Own Your Own Public Library and Take Your Place with Progressive Cities!” Another urged, “Mr. Average Taxpayer, pay fifty cents a year and remove this stigma from Los Angeles’ name!” A short film showing the overcrowded reading rooms played in theaters around the city. A flyer supporting the bond issue stated bluntly:

  A MASS OF REASONS WHY WE NEED A DECENT LIBRARY HOME

  Because: Every Self-Respecting City Owns Its Own Library Home. San Francisco and Seattle make us look like a village with their own fine library homes, best proof of their culture and mental development. “Los Angeles,” they can say, “hasn’t advanced far enough to care for a first-class public library,” while we hang our civic head with shame and mortification.

  A local historian named Luther Ingersoll published a passionate letter supporting the building of a library. Titled “Our Public Disgrace,” Ingersoll’s missive begged the public to erase the “intolerable abuses” inflicted on all citizens by Los Angeles’s inadequate library. He pitied librarians for being jammed into quarters “surrounded by codfish, onions, Hamburger steaks and Limburger cheese.”

  The bond issue was a success, passing with seventy-one percent approval. But it raised only $2.5 million for library construction, which was a measly sum; the New York Public Library’s building, for instance, had a $9 million construction budget. The bond issue wasn’t even enough to buy the entire lot that had been proposed as the library’s site. In 1923, Ballot Measure #2, to pay for the remaining land, was put before the voters. The city held a contest to pick a slogan in support of the measure. The entries included, for instance, “Hey Diddle Diddle / The Cat and the Fiddle / The cow jumped over the moon / But the library can’t jump / So we voters must hump / To see that it has enough room”; but the winning slogan was the simple declarative “The library will belong to you / Keep it in sight / Vote ‘Yes’ on Two.” The measure passed, and at last, Los Angeles had money to begin building its own library.

  Like so much in Los Angeles, the library began with a reinvention. Most of the topography of downtown was crumpled and ridged by ranges of hills. The hills were once prized as landmarks. But as the city began to develop, hills were thought of as annoyances to be clambered over and built around, impeding the city’s growth because they were too steep to support large structures. Flat areas like Hollywood and Watts grew much faster than downtown, because of this knobby topography. The hills had developers stumped. In 1912, one business association proposed laying a pipeline from the Pacific Ocean to the center of the downtown, and using piped-in seawater to blast the hills away. Another suggested lifting the hills with hydraulic jacks and then knocking them over, or using a fleet of backhoes to chip them away.

  The site chosen for the library was the block between Flower Street and Grand Avenue, bound by Fifth and Sixth Streets. It was on the southern flank of the Bunker Hill Ridge and was pitched so sharply that it was a designated topogr
aphical feature known as Normal Hill. It was too steep for something the size of the proposed library, so a clutch of steam shovels set upon it, scratching away until what remained was mostly level, with a lazy angle on the Grand Avenue side. (Eventually, many of downtown’s other hills were also either scraped down or leveled off. Bunker Hill itself was lowered by sixty feet.)

  The favored candidate to design the library was a New York architect named Bertram Goodhue, who had gained notice in California for designing San Diego’s 1915 Panama-California Exposition, a sunny array of buildings with troweled stucco walls, terra-cotta roofs, and lavish decoration. The design was so popular that it inspired an outbreak of Spanish Revival architecture in Southern California and beyond.

  Goodhue was slim and debonair, with a girlish complexion, a cresting wave of yellowy hair, and an air of impending tragedy. He was born in Connecticut and, at the age of fifteen, became an apprentice at a New York architectural firm. In addition to architecture, he excelled at book design and typography. He invented Cheltenham, one of the world’s most popular typefaces; the New York Times used it as a headline font for decades. He was a workaholic and often spent fourteen hours a day at his drafting table. He was also pensive and neurotic, and suffered from inexplicable aches, unaccountable pains, and pervasive anxiety. He seesawed between bursts of ecstasy, which occurred when he was exposed to great art, and troughs of melancholy. His friends considered him mercurial and poetic. In his spare time, he enjoyed drawing intricate sketches of imaginary cities.

  Goodhue’s earliest buildings were neo-Gothic churches and residences with spiky rooflines and elaborate stone latticework. His aesthetic began to change in 1892, when he visited Mexico and Spain and fell in love with the bright color and exuberance of the architecture. In 1902, he traveled to Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula and became fascinated by the domes and tile work of Islamic buildings. He visited California for the first time at the turn of the century. When he returned to New York, he told friends that he was enchanted by California and was eager to go back. Los Angeles, though, struck him as a strange place. In a letter, he described it as “a painfully big city wherein dwell practically no native sons of The Golden West, but a heterogeneous mob of movie actors and actresses and emigrants from Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa . . .”

  Soon after he had finished his work on the Panama-California Exposition, Goodhue flew on an airplane for the first time, and the view from the sky transformed him. He was astonished by the power of bold, simple forms standing out of the distant landscape, and how profound they were even from a mile above. The airplane ride changed the way he thought about buildings. His next commission was the Nebraska State Capitol. His design was much more streamlined and geometric than his previous buildings, featuring a low, wide stone base and a skyscraper tower. On the Nebraska prairie, it rose like a Machine Age monument, a limestone lighthouse. From the sky, it had a mighty presence.

  Goodhue also began toying with the idea that a building should be a sort of book—an entity that could be “read.” He wanted a building’s form, its art, its ornamental surfaces, its inscriptions, even its landscaping, to connect in a unified theme that reflected the purpose of the building. Experiencing the building would be immersive. Everything about it would work together to tell a story about what the building was.

  This kind of singularity of design and decoration is typical of religious structures, but it was rare for a secular building. Goodhue knew it was a complex task; instead of simply designing the form of the building, he would have to consider its interior, the land around it, the art hung inside it. He realized such a building needed a team working together. The architect would plan the building; a writer would develop the narrative theme; a sculptor would create the three-dimensional ornamentation; and an artist would be responsible for the color and surfaces. All of them would operate in service to the same concept. Goodhue had first begun exploring this notion when he developed the Nebraska capitol, and his team there was the prominent sculptor Lee Lawrie; an artist named Hildreth Meiere; and a professor of philosophy named Hartley Burr Alexander. In addition to being an academic, Alexander was a poet and a scholar of Native American culture and political thought. He coined the term “iconographer” to describe his role in the project.

  The Nebraska State Capitol took ten years to complete. Goodhue’s idea of incorporating visual and conceptual symbolism inside and out is essential to the character of the building. It was declared a great success and ended up influencing public buildings throughout the world.

  By 1922, when he was hired to design the Los Angeles library, Goodhue had designed dozens of prominent buildings. He had won awards and dozens of important commissions. He had a happy marriage. He doted on his two children. He and his wife were popular; people invited them to parties and dinners all the time. Nevertheless, Goodhue was often gloomy and was obsessed with death and old age, which annoyed his wife. Work helped distract him from his morbid frame of mind. The library wasn’t his biggest project, but he was exhilarated by it. He approached it with a kind of freedom he had never experienced before. He believed that its design could fuse everything he had learned and loved in the visual world into a monument to things he valued most: history, books, philosophy, design, aspiration, creativity.

  He began sketching, with the idea of combining the fancifulness of Spanish Revival with a more modern silhouette. Thematically, he imagined the building as a tribute to the glories of knowledge—in effect, it would be a humanist cathedral celebrating the great intellectual works of civilization. Each lintel would tell a story. All the walls would carry messages. He asked Lawrie and Alexander to join him again as part of the design team. Goodhue sensed he was creating something that was even more profound than the Nebraska Capitol. He felt he was shedding all the conventions of his training and all orthodoxy of style. He wasn’t even sure how to describe what he was doing. “My Gothic is no longer anything like historically correct,” he wrote in a letter to an architect friend. “My Classic is anything but book Classic . . . at Los Angeles I have a Public Library in the same strange style, or lack of style.” The building became singularly important to him. “I’ve come to take a deep personal interest in the success of this building,” he told Everett Perry. “I promise to do something of which the city will be proud.” He might have imagined spending time in the library himself someday. He loved California, and in 1920, he built a house for himself near Santa Barbara.

  His first sketches presented a squat building on an enormous blocky base, squeezed down by a low lid of a dome. The Municipal Art Commission, which had to approve the plans, dismissed it as inadequate and “unimpressive.” A newspaper article sniped, CITY TO GET DINKY LIBRARY ACCORDING TO PLANS ANNOUNCED. Goodhue was miffed but agreed to rework the drawings. By the time he produced his final version of the library, it had changed into something entirely different. The ornamental arched windows of the first sketch were now streamlined into stacks of rectangular panes. The blocky base was squared off, slimmed down, and broken up with ascending terraces, making a cubist assemblage of crisp, angled shapes with entrances on four sides. The squashed dome was gone. The top of the building was now an enormous but somehow delicate pyramid-shaped tower. The tower was covered in thousands of brilliantly colored tiles and crowned with a finial of a human hand holding an open flame, rising from a golden torch. The facade of buff-colored stucco was embellished with Lee Lawrie’s architectural sculptures of thinkers, gods, heroes, and writers. Throughout the building were inscriptions addressing Hartley Burr Alexander’s theme, “The Light of Learning.” They included Plato’s “Love of the beautiful illuminates the world”; French intellectual Blaise Pascal’s “Thought is the Grandeur of Man”; and Alexander’s own quote, which seemed to embody the spirit of the public library: “Books invite all; they constrain none.” The building had a quality that was like a taste on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite explain. It was classic and symmetrical but had a hint of something foreign—maybe Per
sian or maybe Egyptian. It was fantastical yet as tidy as a toolbox.

  The year 1924 was full of change and portent. The opening of King Tut’s tomb and the first performance of Rhapsody in Blue electrified art and design. Goodhue’s building incorporated the feel of Egypt and the jazzy lyricism of Gershwin. The Municipal Art Commission loved his new drawings, so he returned to New York and began working intensely on the final plans. He hoped the library would be more than memorable. He wanted it to be exciting and even challenging; he hoped it would make the people of Los Angeles “sit up and scratch their heads.” By mid-April, he was almost finished. He was about to turn fifty-five, and he planned to spend his birthday in Washington, D.C., at the dedication of his most recently completed building, the National Academy of Sciences’ new headquarters. In spite of his predisposition to gloom, Goodhue was thrilled about his progress on the Los Angeles library. He was perhaps as happy as he had ever been.

  On April 23, without any forewarning, and to the shock of everyone around him, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue dropped dead of a massive heart attack. In spite of the library’s importance to the city and the attention being paid to the project, there was curiously little news of his death in the Los Angeles papers, other than a single-column story in the Los Angeles Times with the headline DEATH OF ARCHITECT OF LIBRARY DEPLORED.