by Susan Orlean
In 1966, a city study known as the Green Report recommended that the Goodhue Building be torn down. The report advised replacing it with a building that would be twice as big as the current building, with an open interior and lots of parking. This proposed library would be more of a book warehouse than a traditional library, and it would no longer be in the bull’s-eye of downtown but somewhere off the beaten track. The proposal had its fans. City Librarian Harold Hamill supported it, as did Councilperson Gilbert Lindsay, who said the city should “find some deteriorated ghetto skid-row land and put a great beautiful library on it.”
Los Angeles seemed to always be moving toward the eternal future; it was a city that shed memories before they had a chance to stick. In 1966, no organized architectural preservation group existed in Los Angeles. To many people, the idea that there were historic buildings in spanking-new Los Angeles seemed like the punch line to a joke. But there were scores of meaningful buildings in the city. Some had fancy bloodlines, like the library. Many were examples of vernacular architecture that captured their time perfectly and were essential to the look and feel of the city. In general, old buildings weren’t valued historically or architecturally or civically. The development potential of the land underneath them was paid more heed. Most old buildings went down without a fight; the haste to modernize knocked out many. The list of Los Angeles’s vanished masterpieces included the turn-of-the-century Hollywood Hotel; the exotic Garden of Allah Hotel, built in 1927; Mary Pickford’s classic Tudor mansion, Pickfair; and the Marion Davies Beach House, built in 1926 by her lover William Randolph Hearst. Across the street from the library, the Richfield Oil Company was headquartered in a spectacular art deco building with a skin of black and gold and a neon-lit oil derrick for its rooftop finial. When Richfield merged with Atlantic Refining and became ARCO, its executives decided the art deco building didn’t project the sleek international image they wanted. The glorious old building was torn down and replaced by a skyscraper distinguished only by the fact that it was the thirty-second-tallest building in the city. “The [new] Richfield Tower celebrates the funeral of the future,” Ray Bradbury said. “One can only wish for an earthquake to improve it out of existence.”
The Goodhue Building—too small, too old, too decorative, too eccentric—seemed doomed until a group of architects, including Barton Phelps, John Welborne, and Margaret Bach, rallied people who were determined to save it. They knew the situation was urgent, and they managed to draw together a committed group. They were known officially as the Southern California Chapter/American Institute of Architects Library Study Team and met in office space donated by architect Frank Gehry. The team argued the building’s case to the city’s Cultural Heritage Board. After deliberation, the Cultural Heritage Board agreed with them, and designated the library Historic Cultural Monument No. 46.
Even in its sorry state, people used the library. The reading rooms were often filled with patrons, and the line at the checkout desk snaked around the lobby. In the 1960s, Chicago had a larger population than Los Angeles. Los Angeles’s library, though, was much more active: It loaned out 4.2 books per capita, compared to Chicago’s 2.7. Maybe because it was a young library in a young city, Los Angeles was always looking to try new things. The Innovations Committee regularly brainstormed ways to make the library easier to use and more essential to the public, such as adding drive-through book returns and a child-care center. Another proposal suggested creating two different gathering places within the library. One would be called “Today Center,” with material on current events and a stock ticker. The other would have an alternative emphasis and feature materials from “political activists, gay liberation, new poets, Third World groups, radical scientists.” There would be a graffiti board and drop-in poetry jams, sofas and comfortable chairs for hanging out, and it would stay open twenty-four hours a day.
Even though the Internet and electronic media wouldn’t appear for decades, you can sense, even in the 1960s, that librarians knew traditional book lending would not always be the institution’s chief purpose. One innovations report advised presciently that the public be dissuaded from having a narrow concept of what a library was, because libraries were “increasingly moving in the direction of functioning as information centers as well as being repositories of book collections.”
One feature considered critical to patron loyalty was a good reference desk. Central Library’s reference department was called the Southern California Answering Network—SCAN—and it was popular locally and also nationally, since people on the East Coast who needed an answer after five P.M. Eastern Standard Time, when their local libraries were closed, could get ahold of SCAN for three additional hours. The SCAN librarians kept records of the requests they received, and they read like synopses of a play; each one seems like a snapshot of life that concluded with someone saying, “Let’s just call the library!
Patron call. Wanted to know how to say “The necktie is in the bathtub” in Swedish. He was writing a script.
Patron called asking for a book on liver disorders for her husband who is a heavy drinker.
Patron wants to know origin of the expression “bear coughed at the North Pole.” (Unable to provide answer.)
Patron call asking whether it is necessary to rise if National Anthem is played on radio or television. Explained that one need only do what is natural and unforced; for instance, one does not rise while bathing, eating, or playing cards.
Patron is a writer in Hebrew; wanted to create a pun between the word for Zion and the word for penis. We couldn’t find a term for penis, but the word copulate is mtsayen which helped her make her pun with tsion.
Patron is an actor who has to impersonate Hungarian secret police. Wanted words pronounced. Found a Hungarian-speaking librarian who spoke to him.
Patron inquiring whether Perry Mason’s secretary Della Street is named after a street, and/or whether there is a real street named Della Street.
Patron asked for help writing inscription for father’s tombstone.
In 1973, the library even added a service called the Hoot Owl Telephonic Reference, which operated from nine P.M. until one A.M., long after the library was closed. Dialing H-O-O-T-O-W-L connected you to a librarian who could find the answer to almost any question. The Hoot Owl slogan was “Win Your Bet Without a Fight.” Apparently, in the late evening, people all over Los Angeles did a lot of betting on trivia such as the correct names of the Seven Dwarves. The service got a call every three minutes, adding up to about thirty-five thousand a year. Hoot Owl was a favorite target of conservative groups, who believed it catered to “hippies and other night people.” But the library persisted, and Hoot Owl operated every weeknight until the end of 1976.
21.
Harry Peak after his release from jail
The Alibi (1916)
By England, George Allan
M
The Rediscovery of Morals, with Special Reference to Race and Class Conflict (1947)
By Link, Henry C.
323.3 L756
The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (2015)
By Denery, Dallas G.
177.3 D392
Garfield Gains Weight (1981)
By Davis, Jim
740.914 D262-1
As the investigation into the library fire zeroed in on him, Harry started rewriting his story over and over, each iteration a little askew from the one that preceded it. It was like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book, taking a different path at each juncture. When ATF agent Thomas Makar interviewed him, Harry said he was downtown on the day of the fire and wanted to go into the library, but a security guard stopped him at the entrance and told him it was closed. He said he didn’t know the building was on fire until he heard it on the news later that day. A few hours after the interview, Harry called Makar and said he’d misspoken, and that in fact he had never been in Central Library, ever. Four days later, Makar and another ATF agent named Mike Matass
a interviewed Harry again. This time they put him under oath, hoping that would stop the slip and slide of his story. But the story slid. Harry told them he’d gone downtown that morning to do some sightseeing. At some point, he realized he had to call Leonard Martinet and needed to find a telephone. As he was driving around, he noticed a beautiful old building and thought it might have a phone, so he parked nearby. When he started to walk in, a black security guard—he made a point of mentioning the man’s race—told him the building was closed; Harry got a few feet into the building before the guard stopped him. When he turned to leave, he bumped into an elderly woman. He helped her get steady on her feet, and then he escorted her out the door. As he recalled, the woman had thanked him.
When he was finished spelling out how he had spent that morning, Harry told Makar that he was very sorry about the fire and he hoped Makar would catch the arsonist. He said that he appreciated the importance of Makar’s job, and that he’d recently applied for a job at the Santa Monica Fire Department, but he’d failed the written test. Makar took a Polaroid of him to show to witnesses. Harry was charming, friendly, cooperative. After Makar took his picture, Harry said he was happy to take a polygraph test. He seemed eager to have his story confirmed.
A few days later, Harry called Makar and said he wanted to postpone his polygraph test. They talked for a while, and then Harry confided to Makar that he’d made up everything he’d told him so far. He didn’t explain why he had lied. The truth—at least what he was saying was the truth at that moment—was that he hadn’t been anywhere near the library that day, and he had never been inside the library in his life. The morning of the fire, he was miles away, heading to Santa Fe Springs on the 101 Freeway. While driving, he was listening to the news and heard that the library was on fire. He could see smoke rising as he drove past downtown. Makar listened to him sympathetically and then wrote in his notes that, as far as he could tell, Harry was “an aspiring actor . . . and made up the story of having been at the library during the fire to make his life seem more interesting and exciting.”
Harry finally agreed to take a polygraph test on October 27, 1986. The examiner asked him the usual sorts of questions—if he was in the library the day of the fire; if he participated in the fire in any way; if he knew who had set the fire. Harry answered no to every question. Mike Matassa drove Harry home from the test, and they chitchatted along the way. Harry complained to Matassa that he had gained a lot of weight recently and didn’t like the way he looked. He said the problem was that he’d recently stopped using cocaine so he was hungry all the time and eating like a horse. Matassa made a mental note of this, remembering that when the security guard had been shown the Polaroid of Harry, he’d said it looked like a fatter version of the man who asked to use the telephone. Librarians who were shown the picture made the same remark: The man looked familiar, but they remembered the trespasser in the library having longer hair and being slimmer than the man in the Polaroid.
A short time later, the results of Harry’s polygraph were released to the arson team. Using the physiological criteria of the test, the examiner concluded that Peak “was attempting deception when answering the relevant questions.” With this, the investigators fanned out again, interviewing Harry’s friends and roommates, his employers, and his parents, looking for something conclusive—a single thread of events or a motive that would advance the case from warm to hot. But none of the accounts of Harry’s whereabouts that day cohered. In some details, they overlapped—the need for a telephone, the handsome fireman—but in many, they splayed far apart. He was there; he was not there. He was familiar with the library; he had never visited it. He smelled like smoke that day; he was odor-free. It was like looking at something through a kaleidoscope and seeing its pieces fractured and rearranged. The only constant among those interviewed was the opinion that Harry was a fabulist. “He finds it difficult to give a straight answer,” one friend told investigators. “He doesn’t know the difference between fabrication and truth.” A former roommate said he’d kicked Harry out because of his compulsive fibbing. “It really got upsetting,” he said. “He really couldn’t control his lying. We couldn’t stand it any longer. But he’s a good person.”
The problem with Harry was that he didn’t just pick one lie and stick with it. He presented so many versions of the story that believing one meant disbelieving another; he produced a continuous coil of untruths, each contradicting the one preceding it, unlike a more typical single-track denial that at least was internally consistent, whether or not it was true. It was confusing and almost impossible to believe him. At best, you could believe what he said at a single fixed point in time, but just when you grew accustomed to that rendition of his truth, he produced another account that undid the one you had chosen to trust. For some reason, I felt a kind of affection for Harry Peak, for his blundering keenness and pure hunger for fame, but I could never find a moment when his stories stood still and I felt like I really knew who he was or what he believed.
Investigators went to see Harry’s father at his job at Lockheed. He told them that he thought Harry was capable of setting fire to a vacant building, but he would never burn a library because he loved art and antiques. Harry was a good kid who was figuring out what he wanted to do with his life, he said. In fact, Harry had just told him he’d passed the entrance exam at the Santa Monica Fire Department and was on the waiting list for a job.
The fire began to feel like old, unresolved news. Stories in the Los Angeles papers took on a weary tone, droopy with stock phrases like “continuing investigation” and “ongoing inquiries.” The only suspect who resonated with the investigators was Harry, but the evidence against him was like mercury: slippery, shape-changing, inconstant. In March, investigators decided to try a new approach. The response to the Polaroids stuck in their minds, as did Harry’s comments about having gained weight. They got access to Harry’s driver’s license photo, taken two years earlier, when he was thinner and had long hair and a mustache. This was closer to the way he looked the day of the fire, before he cut his hair and shaved his mustache and put on his post-cocaine weight.
Eight library staff members who reported seeing a suspicious man the day of the fire were shown the new photo lineup. Six picked Harry’s driver’s license photo. The other two weren’t able to identify anyone from the photos they were shown. Six out of eight positive identifications were enough to warrant another interview with Harry.
His story now took another turn. He told the investigators that he had never been in Central Library in his life. He said that on the morning of the fire, he’d hung out with two friends, whom he named and said would vouch for him. At ten A.M., he left Los Angeles and drove, by himself, to Santa Fe Springs. He went to his parents’ house. No one was there, but he went inside. At some point, he called Leonard Martinet from his parents’ phone. He was so confident of that fact that he said Matassa could check with the phone company to get proof of his calls to Martinet.
A few days later, General Telephone provided records of calls made to and from the Peaks’ house in Santa Fe Springs the morning of April 29, 1986. No calls were made to Martinet’s law firm from the Peaks’ phone, nor were there any calls from Martinet to the phone.
A few days later, investigators interviewed Harry again, and this time his story pivoted entirely. He explained that the morning of the fire, he had spent time with two friends—different from the ones he’d mentioned previously. After hanging out for a while, he’d left his friends and headed to French Market Place, a frowsy collection of shops and small businesses in West Hollywood. Harry had plantar warts on his foot, and he had an appointment with his chiropodist, Stephen Wilkie, whose office was there.
After Wilkie treated Harry’s warts, he closed his office, and he and Harry went for brunch at the French Quarter, a café in French Market Place. The Very Reverend Basil Clark Smith joined them, and the three men enjoyed a leisurely meal. While clearing the table, their waiter happened to mention that he�
��d heard the library was on fire. The only library Harry knew about was the Los Angeles Law Library, because he went there on many of his errands for Martinet. He assumed the waiter meant that the law library was burning, so he decided to call Martinet to let him know. This was the final version of his whereabouts on the morning of April 29 that he presented. He told investigators that everything else he’d said before had been a joke.
It is not easy to keep an accurate count of Harry Peak’s alibis. Some were wholly new and self-contained, whereas others were tweaked and edited versions of previous ones. Investigators, doing the math, said that Harry had given seven different accounts of how he spent that morning. These included placing himself in the building, where he made a dramatic escape from the fire, or placing himself outside the library observing the fire, or in his car driving by, or in Santa Fe Springs, or, finally, at the French Market Place with the Right Reverend Nicholas Stephen Wilkie and the Very Reverend Basil Clark, elders of the American Orthodox Church, where Harry occasionally stayed. He was an equal-opportunity liar, telling contradictory variations of his story to investigators as well as to friends. He performed his fabrications not just to evade legal consequence; he lied to everyone; it was habitual. And he never stopped shifting his story. Months after his arrest, he told his ex-boyfriend Demitri Hioteles that he was in the library restroom that day, having sex with a stranger, and he absentmindedly dropped his cigarette in a trash can and the fire started. This story implicated him directly, and it even had the virtue of being logical: The fire had been an accident, and he fibbed to cover up that he was unfaithful. But the story was patently untrue. The fire never reached the library’s restrooms. It remains a mystery why Harry would want to say he committed a crime when it simply couldn’t have happened the way he described it. Sometimes I wondered if Harry could remember what the truth was or would have recognized it if he’d heard it.