Why you should experience Los Angeles Central Library in Los Angeles, California.
Los Angeles Central Library is a grand civic institution where Downtown's metropolitan character meets Bertram Goodhue's architectural experimentation, symbolic public art and the intellectual infrastructure of a rapidly expanding twentieth-century city.
Set along West 5th Street near South Grand Avenue and just steps from Pershing Square, the library occupies the southern foot of Bunker Hill where Downtown's elevated financial district descends toward the flatter commercial grid surrounding Broadway and Spring Street. Its central tower rises above a full city block framed by 5th Street, Flower Street, Hope Street and Grand Avenue, creating a low architectural counterpoint to the skyscrapers surrounding the site. Terraces and landscaped grounds mediate the substantial grade change across the property, with the western edge meeting the higher elevation of Flower Street before the terrain falls east toward the Historic Core. The tiled pyramid crowning the tower remains visible between surrounding high-rises, preserving a distinctive silhouette within a section of Downtown transformed by vertical development. The result is a commanding civic complex whose tower, gardens and position at the base of Bunker Hill preserve an unusually legible connection between Downtown's historic street grid and its modern skyline.
What you should know about Los Angeles Central Library.
Los Angeles Central Library is best known for the 1926 Goodhue Building, the final major work of architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and the first permanent home constructed for a library system founded half a century earlier. City Librarian Everett Robbins Perry spent years pressing for a dedicated central building as Los Angeles expanded, with the city's population doubling and library use tripling between 1911 and 1921. A publicity campaign led by librarian Monica Shannon helped build support for the 1921 bond measure that financed construction, with $1.5 million of the $2.5 million issue directed to Central Library. The city selected the former State Normal School property on the western edge of Downtown, a constrained site bounded by Bunker Hill and substantial neighboring buildings that materially shaped Goodhue's solution. Goodhue organized the design around a central tower and domed rotunda, adapting ideas explored in his Nebraska State Capitol to the dense Los Angeles setting. His death from a heart attack on April 24, 1924 left longtime associate Carleton Monroe Winslow to complete the project. Sculptor Lee Lawrie developed exterior figures representing intellectual disciplines and literary figures, and the summit received a brilliantly tiled pyramid bearing a sunburst beneath a torch symbolizing knowledge. The library opened on July 6, 1926 after 360,000 books and 4,000 catalog drawers were transferred from the Metropolitan Building, followed by a formal dedication on July 15. Dean Cornwell completed twelve California-history murals for the rotunda in 1933, extending Goodhue's architecture through a major cycle of American mural painting.
The struggle to preserve and enlarge the building became one of the decisive episodes in Los Angeles architectural conservation during the late twentieth century. Serious overcrowding and deterioration generated demolition proposals by the mid-1960s even after the city designated Central Library a Cultural Monument in 1967. Resistance to the library's destruction contributed to the formation of the Los Angeles Conservancy in 1978, and a citizens' task force eventually advanced a 1983 solution preserving Goodhue's building while adding substantial new space. Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates received the architectural commission that June, and the city approved a financing plan in 1985 that transferred development rights from the library property to neighboring high-rise projects. Disaster struck on April 29, 1986 when an arson fire burned for hours, destroyed 395,000 books and damaged another 750,000 through smoke and water as more than 250 firefighters responded. Forty-four firefighters were injured, and more than 1,700 volunteers subsequently joined the effort to freeze and salvage damaged volumes. A second arson fire on September 3 destroyed another 25,000 books from the music collection, followed by further damage during the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake. The Save the Books campaign, co-chaired by ARCO chairman Lodwrick M. Cook and Mayor Tom Bradley, reached its $10 million fundraising target within 22 months, including a $2 million contribution from the Getty Trust. Norman Pfeiffer's completed expansion placed the immense Tom Bradley Wing largely underground, more than doubling the library's size and restoring landscaped ground above it. Central Library reopened on October 3, 1993, completing a preservation and expansion campaign that simultaneously saved Goodhue's building and helped reshape the surrounding Downtown skyline.
How to fold Los Angeles Central Library into your trip.
Los Angeles Central Library works as the anchor for a Downtown outing connecting an early electrified corporate headquarters, a haberdashery transformed by Parisian decorative arts and a grand hotel whose interiors became gathering places for entertainment, political and social history.
Begin at The CalEdison, completed in 1931 as the Southern California Edison Company headquarters by architects Allison & Allison with Allison & Rible, combining a steel frame with limestone, buff terra cotta and classically inflected Art Deco ornament. The 14-story building became one of the first major structures in the western United States heated and cooled entirely by electricity, turning the headquarters itself into a demonstration of the utility company's product. Sculptor Merrell Gage created allegorical exterior figures representing light, power and hydroelectric energy, and Hugo Ballin painted the lobby mural Power beneath a 30-foot coffered ceiling surrounded by numerous varieties of marble. Continue to Oviatt Building, completed in 1928 by Walker & Eisen as the headquarters of Alexander & Oviatt, among Los Angeles's prestigious menswear businesses. James Oviatt encountered the new decorative style at the 1925 Paris Exposition and redirected the project toward an elaborate Art Deco interior, commissioning René Lalique for more than 30 tons of glass as well as mallechort elevator doors, mailboxes and other decorative elements. Oviatt occupied a ten-room penthouse furnished by the Parisian firm Saddler et fils, extending the building's European decorative program into his private residence above the shop and offices. Conclude at The Biltmore Hotel Los Angeles, opened in 1923 as the largest hotel west of Chicago and designed by Schultze and Weaver in a Beaux Arts composition enriched by Renaissance Revival influences. Italian muralist Giovanni Smeraldi decorated major interior rooms, and the original lobby developed into the Rendezvous Court beneath a Moorish beamed ceiling and beside a Spanish Baroque staircase leading toward a 350-foot galleria. The hotel hosted the Academy Awards eight times between 1931 and 1942 and became an important social gathering place for LGBTQ Angelenos through its Grand Avenue Bar during the 1940s and 1950s. The progression moves from an Art Deco headquarters conceived around the possibilities of electric power through James Oviatt's importation of Parisian decorative craftsmanship and culminates inside Schultze and Weaver's grand metropolitan hotel, tracing the architectural ambition that remade Central Los Angeles during the decades surrounding the library's construction.
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