The Carnegie Library, 1900 to 1920

With the opening of the first, fully-tax funded major public library building project, McKim, Mead & White’s Boston Public Library at Copley Square (completed in 1894), interest increased in new ways of designing standalone, purpose-built library buildings. With the increasing status of librarianship as a profession, librarians increasingly sought a voice in the debate over effective library design (Oehlerts, 1991). William Frederick Poole, a founding member of the ALA and a proponent of functionalism, urged his colleagues as early as 1879 (around the time of Richardson’s libraries) to “[a]void everything that pertains to the plan and arrangement of the conventional American library building” (quoted in Lushington, 2002, p. 3). Poole advocated something he called the “book-room” plan (a forerunner to the later subject department model), which he later employed in his proposed concept for the Newberry Library of Chicago in the late-1880s (Rogers, 1976).

In the 1890s, debates about the merits of closed versus open access designs for smaller and mid-sized libraries become commonplace. Opponents of the open access model warned against the mutilation and theft of library materials, the spreading of bacteria and diseases, and general disorder in the library. Proponents spoke of the greater freedom for users and the efficiency of mixing readers and books more directly. One figure who saw the potential of the open access model was John Cotton Dana who, in 1897, declared that the public library building might be better modeled after factory buildings or offices rather than museums (Mattern, 2007). For a brief period in the 1890s a half-open, half-closed model prevailed in some libraries known as the “safe-guarded open access” model. This model allowed users into stackrooms but the placement of the librarian’s desk was at the entrance so that users were in full view of the librarian at all times and could not leave the stackroom without passing the librarian’s desk.

21 It was in 1898 that philanthropist

Andrew Carnegie began his

“national” phase of library giving,7 the phase during which the modern public library “type” developed. Carnegie’s grant program followed a simple set of rules: Carnegie libraries had to be free, and communities had to pledge to support the library through local taxation. Size of a community’s population determined the size of

the grant, which ultimately determined the size of the library building. Other than that, in the early years of the program Carnegie and his representatives exerted little architectural control over library forms. If anything, architectural fashion was perhaps the greatest influence upon library buildings at this time. Following the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, “neoclassical” architecture had become a popular style among institutional (libraries, museums, courthouses, and post offices) and commercial buildings (banks, and insurance companies, among others). Their “high style” conveyed a sense of civic prosperity just as their use of symmetry conveyed a sense order: the “order” of the library’s collections (Dale & Burrell, 2008) as well as the “order” that the library sought to impose on its public. The appearance of the early Carnegie library building thus fit well into the values of North America’s “progressive era,” a period of intense civic development and wide expansion of municipal services (Jones, 1997). Public libraries, it was believed, had the potential to “correct” the ills of industrialized society—crime, poverty and violence, among others (Breisch, 1997)—by providing for the working classes a more propitious alternative to drinking, gambling and prostitution (see section 2.3.1.).

7 _{An earlier period, beginning in 1883 and ending in the mid-1890s, saw Carnegie pay for several libraries in his homeland of Scotland}

and in several of his American steel-towns, among them Allegheny, Homestead and Pittsburgh. During this former phase, Carnegie paid for all necessary expenses, including books and furnishings, whereas in his later period he paid (with some exceptions) for only the buildings. Since it was during this later period that his interest in funding libraries stretched outside of his steel towns, it has been referred to as his “national” period. (It is an American-centric term since he actually funded the construction of libraries all over the world, including Canada.)

2vi

One of the best examples of “wasteful design” was architect W. Colwill Frye’s Carnegie library in Guelph, Ontario, opened in 1905. After seeing Colwill’s work, James Bertram forwarded the blueprints to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Chief Librarian, E. H. Anderson, for critique. Disgusted, Anderson called the library “grandiloquent... of the pillar-sham” style (quoted in Beckman, Langmead & Black, 1984, p. 35). (Public domain; postcard from the author’s collection.)

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Early Carnegie libraries were certainly handsome works of architecture but were not well- suited for long-term use. Without any readily available standards or guidelines for library buildings, smaller and mid-sized communities had been left little choice but to mimic the monumentalist forms they recognized in larger, central libraries. Early Carnegie libraries (for an example, see image 2vi) thus resembled wedding cakes, heavily decorated with multi- pillared porticos, raised entrances, domed atriums and even stained glass windows (Beckman, Langmead & Black, 1984; Van Slyck, 1995; Jones, 1997). Their interiors were often just as ornate, employing heavy partitioning in order to create highly specialized rooms. Over the first ten years of his grant program, Carnegie’s concern for the “waste” of his funds on frilly, monumental buildings grew, and by 1908 prompted a reform of process. Carnegie’s secretary, James Bertram, who supervised the library building program from 1898 until its end in 1917, took increased control of Carnegie library designs around 1907 and, from 1908 onward, made his approval of blueprints a necessary condition for funding (Oehlerts, 1991). Bertram’s intentions were to keep building costs to a minimum while maximizing efficiency of operation within the building itself. His aim was to modernize the smaller and mid-sized public library in its approach to organizing its activity.

The plan Bertram encouraged was an overall rectangular form, including room at the rear for a librarian’s office (Bobinski, 1969; Van Slyck, 1995; Jones, 1997; Lushington, 2002). Rarely did he allow for more than one storey above grade; basements were raised to provide another functional level and often included a lecture room, technical services, cataloguing, and janitorial functions. The main floor (see 2vii) followed an open plan and was lined with perimeter shelving. Bertram encouraged the inclusion of children’s areas or departments (Jones, 1997) and suggested bisecting the main floor of the library into two main zones: adult and children’s. Reference collections were usually enclosed in the adult area, none too far from the librarian’s reach. The card catalogue was frequently placed near the service desk (Cohen & Cohen, 2003). The librarian’s desk was central within the floorplan; sometimes it was placed nearer the back. Either way, the placement of the service desk was crucial: the entire main floor was to be seen from the librarian’s desk, giving the librarian a commanding position in the overall design.

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It was during this period that the utilitarian values of public library service intensified.8 The role of the public library during the Carnegie period was shifting away from being a “custodian” of knowledge and becoming more of an “organizer and administrator” of knowledge (Oehlerts, 1991, p. 7). The public library also adopted a sense of literary idealism, taking firm stances on what books “should be read” versus what books were best left for entertainment. Its “utilitarian” zeal remained active to a great extent, up until the Depression

when the unemployed would use the library to learn new trades (Cohen & Cohen, 2003; Curry, 2007). These values had a substantial influence on the typical Carnegie library. For instance, Bertram outlawed in later Carnegie library designs the inclusion of such non-library functions as museums, art galleries, and smoking rooms. Bertram’s aim was to make the library buildings as dedicated to library service as possible. He believed such “recreational” functions were distracting to library users conducting quiet study (Bobinski, 1969; Jones, 1997; Griffis, 2010).

8 _{Though some claim that intellectual idealism prevailed more than utilitarianism (see Black, Pepper & Bagshaw, 2009, p. 34-5),}

promoting reading for reading’s sake as well as life-long learning. There is some truth to this, especially with respect to the public library’s growing interest in children’s services at this time.

2vii

Schematic representation of the ideal smaller library floorplan, an image derived from Bertram’s exemplars and published in the 1924 planning guide Library Buildings: Notes and Plans written by Chalmers Hadley and published by the American Library Association.

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Bertram eventually published his suggestions along with several exemplar floor plans in a pamphlet entitled “Notes on the Erection of Library Buildings,” first issued to Carnegie library architects in 1911. Though communities would have to design their Carnegie buildings according to local

conditions, architects were warned to “[p]ause before aiming at radical departures” from Bertram’s models (Van Slyck, 1995, p. 37). Therefore, many later Carnegie libraries looked relatively plain and rectangular (see figures 2viii and 2vix). Though Bertram may have felt that he was influencing only the building designs, he was, arguably, influencing much more. By dictating the Carnegie library’s spatial construction Bertram was at the same time dictating the library’s program and purpose as an organization. Bertram designed not just the library building to be modern,

but the users to be modern, too: the values of industrial capitalism were replete within the Carnegie library. (This was unsurprising, given that a world-famous industrial capitalist who believed that work and study advanced the working class was funding these libraries.) The influence of the modern factory, where foremen stood on raised platforms overseeing the entire workspace, is obvious when looking at Bertram’s plans. The Carnegie library employed the same basic concept, only the librarian was the foreman and the library user was the worker (see Stevenson, 2005).

It is at this point that the story of public library design branches in two distinct directions: small and mid-sized library design, and large central library design. Both types had always coexisted but it was not until the Carnegie era, during which so many smaller and mid-sized

2viii

2vix

Two examples of typical Carnegie libraries after Bertram’s reforms: the Norwich, Ontario library of 1912 (top), and the Renfrew library of 1921

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buildings were constructed, that any radical difference emerged between the two building types other than size. Though Carnegie funded large central libraries in the early days of his grant program (one of them Toronto’s Reference Library, a bookstack library), in its middle and later years he steered clear of them. First, he felt his money was better spent funding a higher number of smaller libraries. The other reason was because, as Van Slyck (1995) implies, at the time of Bertram’s architectural reforms the central public library was too complex an organism to standardize by modern design principles. Carnegie continued to fund library construction in large cities but only neighbourhood branches. For this reason, and because they were still largely dependent on self-supporting bookstacks, central library buildings of the early century were left untouched by Bertram’s “modern library” model.9