by Susan Orlean
Things are always coming in and going out of a library, so it’s impossible to know what it contains on any given day. By 1986, Central Library’s contents were valued, for insurance purposes, at roughly $69 million. That included at least two million books, manuscripts, maps, magazines, newspapers, atlases, and musical scores; four thousand documentary films; census records dating back to 1790; theater programs of every play produced in Los Angeles since 1880; and telephone directories for every single American city with a population over ten thousand. It had America’s finest assemblage of books on the subject of rubber, donated in 1935 by Mr. Harry Pearson, a noted rubber authority. It had a Shakespeare folio; a quarter million photographs of Los Angeles dating back to 1850; car repair manuals for every single make and model of automobile starting with the Model T; five hundred folk dolls from around the world; the only comprehensive patent collection in the western United States; and twenty-one thousand books about sports. It housed the largest collection of books on food and cooking in the country—twelve thousand volumes, which included three hundred on French cuisine, thirty on cooking with oranges and lemons, and six guides to cooking with insects, including the classic Butterflies in My Stomach.
A few minutes before eleven A.M. on April 29, a smoke detector in the library set off an alarm. The library telephone operator called the fire department dispatcher, saying, “Bells ringing at Central Library.” Security guards spread out through the building, instructing patrons to leave. No one was particularly panicked. The library’s fire alarm went off all the time, for all sorts of reasons—a cigarette tossed in a wastebasket, the occasional crackpot bomb threat, and, most often, for no reason at all except that it was an old, crotchety alarm system prone to spasms of hyperactivity. For the staff and regular patrons, the fire alarm had come to possess all the shock value of a clown horn. Packing up and leaving the building was so tiresome that some librarians were tempted to hide out in their workrooms and wait for the all-clear. Most of them left their personal belongings behind when they went out for the alarms, assuming they’d be right back.
When the alarm went off, Norman Pfeiffer began gathering his drawings and his jacket, but Teoman told him not to bother, since she was sure the interruption would be momentary. Some regular patrons also didn’t bother to pack up when they cleared the building. That morning, a real estate broker named Mary Ludwig was in the History Department doing genealogy research. She’d just discovered she was related to a man in Vermont named Hog Howard when the alarm went off. Rather than disturb all her materials, she left them on the reading table, along with a briefcase containing two years’ worth of research notes, and headed to the exit.
Patrons and staff headed out of the building with a minimum of jostling and rushing. The only person to report a disturbance was an elderly woman who told investigators that a young man with blond hair and a wisp of a mustache had bumped into her as he hurried by. She said he seemed agitated, but he stopped to help her get back on her feet before he dashed out the door.
The building emptied out in just eight minutes, and patrons and staff, a total of about four hundred people, clustered on the sidewalk outside. The sun was inching up in the sky and the pavement was warming. A few librarians used the occasion to light up a Chesterfield, the cigarette of choice among the staff. Sylva Manoogian decided to bide her time in the parking lot so she could keep an eye on her new car. Helene Mochedlover, a Literature librarian who is so devoted to the library that she likes to say she was left on the library doorstep as an infant, chatted with Manoogian and admired her car. Everyone watched with only mild interest as a fire truck rolled up and its crew entered the building on the Fifth Street side. The fire department’s visits to Central Library were as fleeting as they were frequent. Usually, firefighters could take a look around and reset the alarm in a few minutes. Engine Company 10—EC10, in fire department parlance—did the initial check, and one of the firefighters radioed to the incident chief that there was “nothing showing”; in other words, it was a false alarm. One of the firefighters went to the basement to clear the alarm system, but it refused to reset—it persisted in indicating that it detected smoke. The firefighter assumed the system was malfunctioning, but just to be sure, the crew decided to take another look around.
The firefighters didn’t have a map of the building’s snaky corridors and staircases, so they could only inch along. The library was organized around four book “stacks,” a method of library storage invented in 1893 for the Library of Congress. The stacks at Central were narrow, freestanding vertical compartments—essentially, big concrete tubes—that ran from the basement to the ceiling of the second floor. Each stack was divided into seven tiers by shelving made of steel grating. The open weave of the shelves allowed air to circulate up and around the books, which was considered beneficial.
For human beings, though, the stacks were unwelcoming. They were dim and tomblike, as constricted as a chimney. Their walls were made of solid concrete. Each tier was less than half a floor high, so navigating them involved a lot of stooping and crouching. The ancient wiring couldn’t handle anything brighter than a forty-watt bulb, leaving the stacks in perpetual twilight. Some of the librarians at Central used a handmade version of a miner’s helmet—a hard hat with a flashlight taped to the brim—when they went looking for books in the stacks. Finding anything there was a challenge beyond just the lack of light. The library had been built to accommodate one million books. By this point, there were more than two million books in its collection, so books were piled in stairwells and crannies and corners and stuffed in any opening on the shelves.
Engine Company 9, EC9, also responded to the initial alarm, parking on the Hope Street side of the building. While waiting to hear that the building was clear and the alarm successfully reset, one of EC9’s crew glanced up and noticed light smoke oozing from the east end of the roof. At that same moment, the firefighters from EC10, inside the building, reached the Fiction Department stacks in the northeast quadrant of the building. There they saw smoke threading along a shelf of books that started with a Robert Coover novel and ended with one by John Fowles. The smoke began to coil upward, drifting through the open grating of the shelves like a ghost. The firefighters tried to radio down to the command post to report the smoke, but the three-foot-thick concrete walls of the stacks blocked the radio signal. One of the firefighters finally clambered out of the stacks and found a telephone in the reading room and called down to the command post to report what they had found.
At first, the smoke in the Fiction stacks was as pale as onionskin. Then it deepened to dove gray. Then it turned black. It wound around Fiction A through L, curling in lazy ringlets. It gathered into soft puffs that bobbed and banked against the shelves like bumper cars. Suddenly, sharp fingers of flame shot through the smoke and jabbed upward. More flames erupted. The heat built. The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering. Their covers burst like popcorn. Pages flared and blackened and then sprang away from their bindings, a ream of sooty scraps soaring on the updraft. The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted. The fire scrambled to the sixth tier and then to the seventh. Every book in its path bloomed with flame. At the seventh tier, the fire banged into the concrete ceiling, doubled back, and mushroomed down again to the sixth tier. It poked around, looking for more air and fuel. Pages and book jackets and microfilm and magazines crumpled and vanished. On the sixth tier, flames crowded against the walls of the stacks, then decided to move laterally. The fire burned through sixth-tier shelves and then nosed around until it found the catwalk that connected the northeast stacks to the northwest stacks. It erupted into the catwalk and hurried along until it reached the patent collection stored in the northwest stacks. It gripped the blocky patent gazettes. They were so thick that they resisted, but the heat gathered until at last the gazettes smoked, flared, crackled, and dematerialized. Wind gusts filled the vacuum made by the fire. Hot a
ir saturated the walls. The floor began to fracture. A spiderweb of hot cracks appeared. Ceiling beams spalled, sending chips of concrete shooting in every direction. The temperature reached 900 degrees, and the stacks’ steel shelves brightened from gray to white, as if illuminated from within. Soon, glistening and nearly molten, they glowed cherry red. Then they twisted and slumped, pitching their books into the fire.
The two fire companies inside the building connected their equipment to the standpipes and headed into the stacks, but their biggest hoses, swollen stiff with water, couldn’t make the sharp turns in the tight stairways. Dean Cathey, one of the captains on duty, remembered tugging hoses that wouldn’t budge. The firefighters traded them for smaller, more nimble hoses. The thinner stream of water from the small hoses sizzled and evaporated in the flames. In the stacks, with their open grid of shelving, the fire rose up while the water flooded down. Firefighters tossed salvage covers on the shelves, hoping to protect the books from the fury of fire and water.
The battalion chief, Donald Cate, alerted City Hall and the head of the fire department, Donald Manning, that an emergency was unfolding at the library. EC9 and EC10 were overwhelmed. Engine companies around the city were mustered. By eleven thirty A.M., an additional eight command officers and twenty-two fire companies in full firefighting turnouts and breathing apparatus assembled at Fifth and Flower. An ambulance parked on Hope Street. When the fire proved too much even for this larger team, Cate called for more help. Within an hour, the force grew to include sixty firefighter companies, nine ambulances, three helicopters, two emergency air units, 350 firefighters, and one arson unit—in total, more than half the fire department resources in the entire city of Los Angeles. Donald Manning arrived at the library. He worried that the department would be caught short if another major fire occurred in the city, so he asked the county fire department to field calls for the city while the library was burning. By this time the fire in the library was spreading fluidly, like spilled ink. The fire department spokesperson, Tony DiDomenico, watched from the sidewalk on Fifth Street. Talking to one reporter, he sounded worried: “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’ ”
In the physics of fire, there is a chemical phenomenon known as a stoichiometric condition, in which a fire achieves the perfect burning ratio of oxygen to fuel—in other words, there is exactly enough air available for the fire to consume all of what it is burning. Such a ratio creates an ideal fire situation, which results in total, perfect combustion. A stoichiometric condition is almost impossible to create outside of a laboratory. It requires such an elusive, precise balance of fuel and fire and oxygen that, in a sense, it is more theoretical than actual. Many firefighters have never seen such a blaze and never will. Not long ago, I had coffee with a man named Ron Hamel. He is now an arson investigator, but at the time of the library fire, Hamel was a captain in the fire department. Although over thirty years have passed, he remains awed by what he saw that day at the library. He talked about it like someone might talk about seeing a UFO. In his decades with the department, Hamel fought thousands of fires, but he said he never experienced another that was as exceptional as the fire at Central Library. Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were a sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy. Hamel said he felt like he was standing inside a blacksmith’s forge. “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell,” he said, tapping his coffee mug. “Combustion that complete is almost impossible to achieve, but in this case, it was achieved. It was surreal.” Frank Borden, who now runs the Los Angeles Fire Department Museum, once said to me, “In every firefighter’s career, there are those fires that are extraordinary and unforgettable. This was one of those.”
The people on the sidewalk outside the library saw the hurried gathering of fire equipment and then noticed the smoke. The boredom of a false alarm was eclipsed by shock. Michael Leonard, who worked in the library’s public relations department, ran to a nearby photography store and told the cashier he needed every roll of film in stock. Back at the library, he took pictures of the building and the smoke scrolling out of the upper windows, but he couldn’t bring himself to take pictures of the librarians, who were watching the fire in anguish. Some of them were crying. Sylva Manoogian told me she could smell the syrupy odor of microfilm burning. She said that as she stood watching the building burn, a charred page floated down to the sidewalk, and she recalled that it was from a book called God Is Judging You. Norman Pfeiffer, the architect, dreading that the building might be a total loss, turned to Elizabeth Teoman and said, “This was the biggest opportunity of my career and it’s going to burn down.” Several members of the Board of Fire Commissioners arrived after they heard the news of the fire and stood with the bystanders on the sidewalk. The multinational oil company ARCO was headquartered in the skyscraper across the street; when employees saw the commotion, many came downstairs to see if they could help. Lodwrick Cook, the head of ARCO, was a supporter of the effort to save and renovate the old building. As soon as he saw the street jammed with fire trucks, he ordered coffee and food from the Bonaventure Hotel for the firefighters and anyone standing by.
Wyman Jones was not at Central Library that morning. Jones was in charge of all seventy-three libraries in the city as well as Central Library; his title was city librarian of Los Angeles and his office was on the fourth floor of the Goodhue Building. That morning, he was at the Hollywood branch library, speaking at the launch of a new literacy program. Jones had been city librarian since 1970. He was a tall, ornery Missourian, a jazz pianist, a skilled amateur magician, and the kind of person who liked to have two cigarettes going at the same time. He supervised the construction of more than a dozen new libraries at his previous posts. He came to Los Angeles hoping to tear down Central Library and replace it with a more modern structure, but he grudgingly agreed to renovate and expand it instead. He liked to say that California was a mess, and Los Angeles was a mess, and the library was a mess, but that somehow, he would make the best of it. As soon as the event at the branch in Hollywood ended, Jones left to head back to his office at Central Library. On the way to his car, he bought a chili dog from a street vendor to eat while driving downtown. He got behind the wheel of his car, turned on the radio, unwrapped his chili dog, heard the news that the library was on fire, threw the chili dog out the window, and sped downtown.
Police shut down a section of the Harbor Freeway, and Sixth, Fifth, Hope, Flower, and Grand Streets, and traffic knotted up around the city. The crowd in front of the library grew. Television and radio reporters lined up, waiting for any word. Inside, the fire was roaring into its third hour. The air in the building was blistering. Water sprayed on the fire boiled like a kettle put on for tea. The runoff from the hoses pooled in the basement and was already fifty inches deep. It was so hot in the building that firefighters couldn’t bear it for long; they took breaks every few minutes so their core temperature could come back down to normal. Because they were breathing so heavily, their supplementary oxygen bottles, which ordinarily last an hour, were depleted in ten minutes. Steam from the boiling water percolated through the firefighters’ heavy flameproof coats. Their ears and wrists and knees were scorched. Their lungs became crisp with smoke. Over the course of the day, fifty of them suffered burns, smoke inhalation, or respiratory distress so extreme that they were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. One firefighter was removed by helicopter from the roof because he was too ill to go back through the fire to exit. All of the firefighters eventually recovered, but the number of casualties was the highest in a single incident that the city’s Emergency Services Bureau ever handled.
As the day went on, it began to seem like the fire might eat the library alive. The compressed space of the stacks made it more like a ship fire than a building fire—it was suffocating, ferocious, feeding on itself. Chief Manning complained
to a reporter, “The architect of this building may have been a great architect, but he didn’t know his fanny from a hot rock when it came to fire protection.” As the reports from firefighters inside the building grew more pessimistic, Manning admitted that it was the most difficult fire the department had ever faced, and it would take “every trick in the book to save this building.” As a statement, it sounded like he was leaving open the possibility that every trick in the book might not be enough. One of Manning’s deputies pulled Elizabeth Teoman aside and told her he didn’t know if they could do anything more because the fire was so intense and the building was so hospitable to it, with the stacks acting as fireplace flues and the books providing so much fuel. He asked her to give him a list of the irreplaceable items in the building, in case that was all they could save. Teoman remembers this as the moment when she realized the fire was real and that it might destroy the entire library. She was so upset that she decided to focus on doing things that were useful, like describing the floor plan to firefighters and telling them what materials she hoped could be preserved.
Chief Manning briefed Wyman Jones, who’d just arrived, and then Manning left for City Hall to give Mayor Tom Bradley a briefing on the fire and to warn him of the possibility that the building could be lost. Bradley had been at a meeting in San Diego that morning, and while he’d flown back as soon as he heard about the fire, he was stuck in traffic near the airport.