General Plan of the Los Angeles Public Library, City Hall location
A long article in the Los Angeles Daily Herald on September 1 prepared Angelenos, explaining all they needed to know to meet their new library. They were invited to freely use its space Monday through Saturday from 9am to 9:30pm, and the reading room was open on Sundays 1pm to 6pm. If a patron wanted to check books out for home use they needed a membership which cost one dollar quarterly (approximately $100 for a year, adjusted for inflation). Los Angeles teachers were allowed to use the library free of charge, courtesy the library's new Board of Directors (five gentlemen of "taste and judgement" appointed by Mayor Henry T. Hazard). However, only library staff was allowed in the stacks, which meant patrons had to know what they wanted and were unable to browse the collection.
The library, which previously occupied rooms in the Downey Block at Temple and Spring, was closed for two months as it prepared for its new location. According to the annual report the books were "cleaned, repaired, counted, classified (Dewey), numbered, bookplates inserted, placed into position, shelf catalogued in duplicate, and a card catalogue begun." Coinciding with the move to a new location, the Board of Directors put out a call in local newspapers for the creation of a bookplate design. Their criteria was that the only lettering on the design should say "Los Angeles Public Library" but there was no set shape or design beyond that. After looking over 46 submissions, San Francisco-based lithography firm H.S. Crocker and Co. was awarded $10 for their winning design. These were the bookplates inserted into the circulating (green angel) and non-circulating (red angel) books. There were 6356 books in the library upon opening in September 1889 (approximately half of them, including government documents, were deemed uninteresting to the general public) with another 4771 added to the collection by December of the same year. Other collections being built included photographs of works of art and architecture, as well as musical scores.
The library could be accessed by stairs or elevator. Initially the elevator only operated from 9am to 5pm daily, which meant library users had to use the stairs after 5. To remedy the situation the library helped pay elevator operating costs. [According to the 1890 annual report the library paid $480 (approximately $13,000 today) that first year.] Indexers greeted library users that arrived by stairs or elevator. Indexers, which looked like wooden boxes with a glass top, helped patrons discover materials the library had available and order them at the appropriate counter (e.g. fiction, non-fiction, periodical). The user would use a hand-crank to browse through cards that listed the materials in the library collection. Larry T. Nix's Library History Buff blog explains the Rudolph Indexer, of the type used in the early years at the City Hall location.
The largest rooms of the library were a general reading room and the non-fiction "book room." This reading room was 75x29 feet and held six reading tables and racks for seventy newspapers. The book room (aka closed stacks) measured 70x50 feet and contained twenty oak bookshelves capable of holding 800 books. Books were retrieved by staff and delivered to a large oak counter. It's interesting to note the number of overhead lamps and the lack of bookends-- used to keep the books upright and prevent damage.
The "Librarian's Room" was 13x15 feet and held union catalogs, book lists, publisher's catalogs. Rare books were also kept in the librarian's office. The library's Board of Directors had a separate office under the tower. The office was described as a small apartment (18x18 feet) where the Board of Directors and librarian met weekly around a giant oak table and surrounded by government and patent documents on the shelves lining the walls.
A 26x29 feet "light and airy apartment, carpeted and with every convenience" served as the Ladies Reading Room. This room, located between the large reading room and Librarian's Room and Director's Room, was also made available to teachers or "any club who wishes to make use of it for discussion." This room later served as a lecture hall also. The library outgrew City Hall and moved to the second floor of the Homer Laughlin Building (aka Grand Central Market building) in 1906; followed by the Hamburger Building in 1908; the Metropolitan Building in 1914 and finally, the Central Library in 1926.
Sources: Los Angeles Public Library Institutional Collection, Annual Reports of the Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles Daily Herald, Los Angeles Times.
