I wrote this for an event but it didn't make the cut, so I post it here for your amusement:
As we start to celebrate the next 150 years of LAPL, I was thinking of things that I know that would be lost to history if I don’t put them on virtual paper. So here, in no particular order is
Betcha didn’t know that:
The old Westchester branch (1950) was SO SMALL it did not have a building address. Everyone just knew where it was.
The oldest building is the Vermont Square Branch. The branch was the first one built by the City of Los Angeles with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. Built in 1913, the Grand Old Lady of the Library remains spry and vital at the ripe old age of nearly 110.
The largest branch is the Mid Valley Regional which houses a Regional Branch, an area Office and the Shipping hub. Originally designed to be the home base for the Valley Mobile Unit, the department created a shipping hub to better serve Valley Branches when the bookmobiles were phased out.
There were originally ten Carnegie Branches in the City of Los Angeles:
· Arroyo Seco which was torn down to build a new branch in 1960 on the same site. THAT building was torn down in 2001 and a new building built on the same site.
· Benjamin Franklin was destroyed in the 1971 Sylmar Quake. The new branch was built on the same site. It was a twin to the Exposition Park Branch,
· Eagle Rock The building is still there, now serving the community as the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, BUT before it became an arts center, it starred in a few low budget horror films as the “Creepy Library”
· Goldwyn-Hollywood burned down in 1983 due to an arson fire. It was rebuilt in 1986 on the same site.
· San Pedro was torn down to rebuild the new branch. The old building remained in service to the community while the new branch was being built on the same grounds. Where the branch stood is now the parking lot.
· Vernon was destroyed in the 1971 Sylmar quake. A new branch was built on the same site.
· Watts. There is no documentation as to what happened to the branch at 9901 S. Grandee when they relocated to a larger branch built as part of the 1957 Bond, at 1501 E. 103rd St.
There are three that remain in service:
· Cahuenga. It was expanded and renovated as a result of the 1989 Bond.
· Lincoln Heights. It was expanded and renovated as a result of the 1989 Bond.
· Vermont Square. It was expanded and renovated as a result of the 1989 Bond.
North Hollywood Library was originally named after an obscure poet named Sidney Lanier. The Board of Library Commissioners at the time felt it was important to name branches after historical figures who had a connection to California or libraries. The library collection began with a donation of books stamped “SL” Staff searched and found Sidney Lanier, although he had no local affiliation, he was the best they could find. Years later, the branch was renamed after Amelia Earhart. Over the mantlepiece in the reading room, there is a quote “I am but a small, winged bird, but I would conquer the world”. The quote is NOT, as assumed, from Amelia. It’s Sidney.
In 1957, LAPL built 28 branches. It was a massive undertaking, but they did save money on design. Many of the branches had the exact same floor plan. For instance, Fairfax, Studio City and El Sereno were “triplets”, Pacoima and Sylmar were mirror images. A sub who worked at both places remarked once that they kept going the wrong way to get to the workroom.
After the 1986 fire, the original “Light of Learning “Torch was removed from the roof during construction. The torch was considered to be too fragile to return to the roof, but as a valued artifact, it was installed and can still be seen in an alcove off the Rotunda on the second floor of Central Library. The architect also repurposed some of the walls of the old children’s courtyard as the entrance to the Taper Auditorium.
Who Ya gonna Call? Ghostbusters! The interior shots in the opening sequence of the classic 1984 film were in the basement of the Central Library, in an area called Toad Hall and Rat Alley (a nod to The Wind in the Willows as well as probably acknowledging the other residents of the room)
For some reason, I thought Stevenson was a Caregie Branch? No?
ReplyDeleteSome years ago, I did a Halloween feature for one of the long-gone, adn to me, anyway, lamented all-staff Halloween parties at Central.
We crated a haunted hallway in one of the lower levels (over the objections of the then ass't city librarian, and part of the feature was "Dead Branches." I hauled in a bunch of (literally) dead branches from massive pruning at my home, and interspersed them with photos and stories about branches long gone and mostly forgotten - much from a teensy little pamphlet loaned to me by the late and definitely lamented Helene Mochedlover. Tere were branches I had never heard of! AND there are still some ot ther e- perhaps those infamous "sub branches" that people had heard rumors of - for instance, a home up on Mount Washington that had a small branch on the lower level. I actually knew two people who used to go there as kids. Helen said, yes, there were mentions of that, but no documentation. For a major library, we were pretty sloppy about record keeping back in the day!
And by the way, besides Bemjamin Frnaklin adn the earlier Expo Park, look at the new Eagle Rock, also a "twin."
But all this is a moot point, as we KNOW, to Central, the branches don't really matter, so they?
Tom