by Susan Orlean
Once I was done with college, and done with researching term papers in the stacks of the Harold T. and Vivian B. Shapiro Undergraduate Library, I sloughed off the memory of those wondrous childhood trips to the Bertram Woods branch, and began, for the first time in my life, to wonder what libraries were for.
It might have remained that way, and I might have spent the rest of my life thinking about libraries only wistfully, the way I thought wistfully about, say, the amusement park I went to as a kid. Libraries might have become just a bookmark of memory more than an actual place, a way to call up an emotion of a moment that occurred long ago, something that was fused with “mother” and “the past” in my mind. But then libraries came roaring back into my life unexpectedly. In 2011, my husband accepted a job in Los Angeles, so we left New York and headed west. I didn’t know Los Angeles well, but I’d spent time there over the years, visiting cousins who lived in and around the city. When I became a writer, I went to Los Angeles many times to work on magazine pieces and books. On those visits, I had been to and from the beach, and up and down the canyons, and in and out of the valley, and back and forth to the mountains, but I never gave downtown Los Angeles a second thought, assuming it was just a glassy landscape of office buildings that hollowed out by five o’clock every night. I pictured Los Angeles as a radiant doughnut, rimmed by milky ocean and bristling mountains, with a big hole in the middle. I never went to the public library, never thought about the library, although I’m sure I assumed there was a public library, probably a main branch, probably downtown.
My son was in first grade when we moved to California. One of his first assignments in school was to interview someone who worked for the city. I suggested talking to a garbage collector or a police officer, but he said he wanted to interview a librarian. We were so new to town that we had to look up the address of the closest library, which was the Los Angeles Public Library’s Studio City branch. The branch was about a mile away from our house, which happened to be about the same distance that the Bertram Woods branch was from my childhood home.
As my son and I drove to meet the librarian, I was flooded by a sense of absolute familiarity, a gut-level recollection of this journey, of parent and child on their way to the library. I had taken this trip so many times before, but now it was turned on its head, and I was the parent bringing my child on that special trip. We parked, and my son and I walked toward the library, taking it in for the first time. The building was white and modish, with a mint green mushroom cap of a roof. From the outside, it didn’t look anything like the stout brick Bertram Woods branch, but when we stepped in, the thunderbolt of recognition struck me so hard that it made me gasp. Decades had passed and I was three thousand miles away, but I felt like I had been lifted up and whisked back to that time and place, back to the scenario of walking into the library with my mother. Nothing had changed—there was the same soft tsk-tsk-tsk of pencil on paper, and the muffled murmuring from patrons at the tables in the center of the room, and the creak and groan of book carts, and the occasional papery clunk of a book dropped on a desk. The scarred wooden checkout counters, and the librarians’ desks, as big as boats, and the bulletin board with its fluttering, raggedy notices were all the same. The sense of gentle, steady busyness, like water on a rolling boil, was just the same. The books on the shelves, with some subtractions and additions, were certainly the same.
It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.
So the spell libraries once cast on me was renewed. Maybe it had never really been extinguished, although I had been away long enough that it was like visiting a country I’d loved but forgotten as my life went galloping by. I knew what it was like to want a book and to buy it, but I had forgotten what it felt like to amble among the library shelves, finding the book I was looking for but also seeing who its neighbors were, noticing their peculiar concordance, and following an idea as it was handed off from one book to the next, like a game of telephone. I might start at Dewey decimal 301.4129781 (Pioneer Women by Joanna L. Stratton) and a few inches later find myself at 306.7662 (Gaydar by Donald F. Reuter) and then 301.45096 (Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama) and finally 301.55 (The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson). On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.
Not long after my son interviewed the librarian, I happened to meet a man named Ken Brecher who runs the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the nonprofit organization that champions the city’s libraries and raises money for extra programming and services. Brecher offered to give me a tour of Central Library, so a few days later, I drove downtown to meet him. From the highway, I could see the quiver of dark skyscrapers in the center of the city that surrounded the library. The summer and fall had been rainless. The landscape around me was bright and bleached, blasted, with an almost ashy pallor. Even the palm trees seemed sapped of color, and the reddish rooftops were whitened, as if dusted with sugar.
I felt new here, and the sheer breadth of Los Angeles still astonished me. It seemed like I could drive and drive and the city would just keep unfurling, almost as if it were a map of Los Angeles being unrolled as I drove over it, rather than a real city that started and stopped somewhere specific. In Los Angeles, your eye keeps reaching for an endpoint and never finds it, because it doesn’t exist. The wide-openness of Los Angeles is a little intoxicating, but it can be unnerving, too—it’s the kind of place that doesn’t hold you close, a place where you can picture yourself cartwheeling off into emptiness, a pocket of zero gravity. I’d spent the previous five years living in the Hudson Valley of New York, so I was more used to bumping into a hill or a river at every turn and settling my gaze on some foreground feature—a tree, a house, a cow. For twenty years before that, I’d lived in Manhattan, where the awareness of when you are in or out of the city is as clear as day.
I expected Central Library to look like the main libraries I knew best. New York Public Library and the Cleveland Public Library are serious buildings, with grand entrances and a stern, almost religious aura. By contrast, the Los Angeles Central Library looks like what a child might assemble out of blocks. The building—buff-colored, with black inset windows and a number of small entrances—is a fantasia of right angles and nooks and plateaus and terraces and balconies that step up to a single central pyramid surfaced with colored tiles and topped with a bronze sculpture of an open flame held in a human hand. It manages to look ancient and modern at the same time. As I approached, the simple blocky form of the building resolved into a throng of bas-relief stone figures on every wall. There were Virgil and Leonardo and Plato; bison herds and cantering horses; sunbursts and nautiluses; archers and shepherds and printers and scholars; scrolls and wreaths and waves. Philosophical declarations in English and Latin were carved across the building’s face like an ancient ticker tape. Compared to the mute towers around it, the library seemed more a proclamation than a building.
I circled, reading as I walked. Socrates, cool-eyed and stony-faced, gazed past me. I followed the bustle of visitors to the center of the main floor, and then I continued past the clatter and buzz of the circulation desk and climbed a wide set of stairs that spilled me out into a great rotunda. The rotunda was empty. I stood for a moment, taking it in. The rotunda is one of those rare places that have a kind of sacred atmosphere, full of a quiet so dense and deep that it almost feels underwater. All the rotunda’s features were larger than life, overpowering, jaw-dropping. The walls were covered with huge murals of Native Americans and priests and soldiers and settlers, painted in dusty mauve and blue and gold. The floor was glossy travertine, laid out in a pattern of checkerboard. The ceiling a
nd archways were tiled with squares of red and blue and ocher. In the center of the rotunda hung a massive chandelier—a heavy brass chain dangling a luminous blue glass Earth ringed by the twelve figures of the zodiac.
I crossed the rotunda and walked toward a large sculpture known as the Statue of Civilization—a marble woman with fine features and perfect posture and a trident in her left hand. I was so stirred by the library’s beauty that when Brecher arrived to give me my tour, I was chattering like someone on a successful first date. Brecher is as thin as a pencil and has bright eyes, pure white hair, and a brisk, barking laugh. He began a running commentary about each fixture, each carving, each plaque on the wall. He also told me about his path to the library, which included stints living with a preliterate tribe of indigenous people in the Central Amazon and working for the Sundance Institute. He seemed electrified by everything he told me about the library, and between his electricity and my excitement, we must have made quite a lively pair. We inched along, stopping every few feet to examine another feature of the building, or to eyeball another shelf of books, or to hear about this or that person who had importance to the place. Everything about the library had a story—the architect, the muralist, the person who developed each collection, the head of each department, the scores of people who worked at the library or patronized it over the decades, many now long gone but still somehow present there, lingering in the wings, a durable part of its history.
We finally made our way to the Fiction Department and stopped near the first row of shelves. Brecher took a break from his commentary and reached for one of the books, cracked it open, held it up to his face, and inhaled deeply. I had never seen someone smell a book quite like that before. Brecher inhaled the book a few more times, then clapped it shut and placed it back on the shelf.
“You can still smell the smoke in some of them,” he said, almost to himself. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, so I tried this: “They smell like smoke because the library used to let patrons smoke?”
“No!” Brecher said. “Smoke from the fire!”
“The fire?”
“The fire!”
“The fire? What fire?”
“The fire,” he said. “The big fire. The one that shut the library down.”
On April 29, 1986, the day the library burned, I was living in New York. While my romance with libraries had not been renewed yet, I cared a lot about books, and I am sure I would have noticed a story about a massive fire in a library, no matter where that library was. The Central Library fire was not a minor matter, not a cigarette smoldering in a trash can that would have gone without mention. It was a huge, furious fire that burned for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2000 degrees; it was so fierce that almost every firefighter in Los Angeles was called upon to fight it. More than one million books were burned or damaged. I couldn’t imagine how I didn’t know of an event of this magnitude, especially something involving books, even though I was living on the other side of the country when it occurred.
When I got home from touring the library with Brecher, I looked up the New York Times from April 29, 1986. The fire had started midmorning, Pacific time, which would have been early afternoon in New York. By then, the Times would have already published that day’s paper. The front-page stories were the usual fare, including the postponement of mobster John Gotti’s trial; a warning from Senator Bob Dole that the federal budget was in trouble; and a photograph of President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, waving goodbye as they embarked on a trip to Indonesia. On the right side of the front page, over a skinny, single-column story, was the headline SOVIET ANNOUNCES NUCLEAR ACCIDENT AT ELECTRIC PLANT/MISHAP ACKNOWLEDGED AFTER RISING RADIATION LEVELS SPREAD TO SCANDINAVIA. The next day, the headline on the follow-up story grew to panic size, announcing SOVIET, REPORTING ATOM PLANT “DISASTER,” SEEKS HELP ABROAD TO FIGHT REACTOR FIRE with a place line of Moscow, U.S.S.R. There was also a special three-page section that began with NUCLEAR DISASTER: A SPREADING CLOUD AND AN AID APPEAL. By the second day, the fear about the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant triggered what was then the largest single-day point loss in the history of the American stock market.
The burning of Central Library in Los Angeles was finally mentioned in the New York Times on April 30, in a story that appeared on page A14. The story laid out the basic facts, mentioning that twenty-two people were injured in the blaze and that the cause of the fire was unknown. Another brief story provided a few more details on the fire and included interviews with residents of Los Angeles speculating about how it would feel to have the library closed indefinitely. There were no other stories about it in the New York Times that week. The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. The books burned while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world.
2.
The fire as seen from Fifth Street
Fire!: 38 Lifesaving Tips for You and Your Family (1995)
By Gibbons, James J.
614.84 G441
Fire Behavior and Sprinklers (1964)
By Thompson, Norman J.
614.844 T474
Fire: Friend or Foe (1998)
By Patent, Dorothy Hinshaw
X 634 P295-2
Fire! The Library Is Burning (1988)
By Cytron, Barry D.
X 614 C997
April 28, 1986, was a peculiarly hot day in Los Angeles. Instead of the silky twinkle of spring, the day had a sullen, leaden feel. But by the next morning, April 29, the heat lifted. The air felt fresh. The sky was the bluest blue.
It had been a strange, sad year, beginning in January, when the Challenger spacecraft exploded, killing its crew of seven astronauts. The week of April 28 buckled under its own share of bad news. An earthquake rocked Central Mexico. Fires broke out in several British prisons, and scores of inmates escaped. The United States and Libya were in a tense standoff. Closer to the library, a bulldozer at a construction site in Carson, California, sheared off a main sewer cap, and raw sewage was gushing into the Los Angeles River.
On April 29, Central Library opened as usual at ten A.M., and within minutes it was humming. About two hundred employees were already in place around the building, from the shipping docks to the circulation desks to the stacks. Glen Creason, a reference librarian who’d worked at Central since 1979, was at his desk in the History Department. Sylva Manoogian, a World Languages librarian, had just gotten a new car, so she parked it with extra care in the library lot before coming in for her shift. Two hundred or so patrons were inside, browsing the shelves or settling in at the reading tables. Four docents herded a large, giggly group of schoolkids on a tour of the building. Elizabeth Teoman, the head librarian at Central, was in her office with Norman Pfeiffer, a New York City architect who’d been hired to renovate and expand the building. Pfeiffer was thrilled about the commission. He loved the Goodhue Building—“The first time I saw it, I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” he told me—and was eager to get to work renovating it and adding a large new wing. The construction plan was the result of almost twenty years of debate about what to do with Central Library, which was over sixty years old, dilapidated, and too small for the city’s needs. Pfeiffer’s drawings were spread on Teoman’s desk. He draped his suit jacket, with his hotel and rental car keys in the pocket, on a chair at the back of the room.
At the time, the library’s fire prevention consisted of smoke detectors and handheld fire extinguishers. There were no sprinklers. The American Library Association, known informally as the ALA, always advised against sprinklers, because water damage was even worse for books than fire damage. In 1986, however, the ALA reversed its position and began advising libraries to install sprinklers. That morning, in fact, down the hall from Elizabeth Teoman’s office, a colleague of Pfeiffer’s, Steven Johnson, was meeting with the fire department to discuss how the sprinklers could be placed inconspicuously in the library’s historic rooms. The library was bui
lt before the development of fire-resistant doors, which are now standard in all large buildings because they halt the spread of fire from one section of the building to another. Fire doors are so effective that new buildings all have them, and older buildings are usually retrofitted with them; they are required by law in most states. Funds for putting them in the library had been in the city budget for more than five years, but somehow, they kept getting overlooked; finally, that day, workers were getting around to installing them.
For years, the library had been written up repeatedly for multiple fire code violations. At this particular moment, there were twenty violations waiting to be resolved. Most were “operational,” including blocked exits, exposed lightbulbs, frayed electrical cords, and the missing fire doors, rather than structural problems with the building. New violations were brought to the fire department’s attention all the time. A number of architectural preservationists suspected that someone was exaggerating the violations to bolster the argument for demolishing the building and replacing it. Even if they were slightly overstated, the building’s problems were real. Twenty years earlier, in 1967, a fire department report had concluded that the probability of a major fire at the library was “very high.” A few years later, the Los Angeles Times called the library “part temple, part cathedral, and part fire hazard.” When Elizabeth Teoman was in library school, she wrote a paper outlining the building’s problems, saying the library was seriously overcrowded but that the large number of fire and safety hazards was even more troubling. She got an A on the paper.