Los Angeles Central Library

About this property

Richard J. Riordan Central Library, primarily known as the Los Angeles Central Library, is the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), in Downtown Los Angeles. It is named after Mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordan. It consists of two buildings: the Goodhue Building and the Tom Bradley addition, from 1926 and 1993, respectively. The former was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) on December 18, 1970. The historic Central Library Goodhue building was constructed between 1924 and 1926 and is a Downtown Los Angeles landmark. The Central Library opened its doors to the public in a soft opening on July 6, 1926 followed by a ceremonial formal opening on July 15, 1926. The Central Library was designed by the architect Bertram Goodhue. The Richard J. Riordan Central Library complex is the third largest public library in the United States in terms of book and periodical holdings. Originally named the Central Library, the building was first renamed in honor of the longtime president of the Board of Library Commissioners and President of the University of Southern California, Rufus B. von KleinSmid. The new wing of the Central Library, completed in 1993, was named in honor of former mayor Tom Bradley. An expansion/renovation was proposed from circa 1966, but the library system did not enact them until 1986. From 1988 through 1993, the Central Library was extensively renovated and expanded in a Modernist/Beaux-Arts style, according to Norman Pfeiffer of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, the principal architect of the renovation. The building's limited access had caused a number of problems. Generally, the accessible public stacks in the reading rooms only displayed about 10 to 20 percent of the actual collections of the Central Library. For anything else, a patron had to submit a request slip and a clerk would retrieve the desired material from the internal stacks. The internal stacks, contained in two concrete structures joined by a catwalk, were packed very tightly and had very little headroom. For example, while the normal reading rooms had ceilings of anywhere from 10 to 15 feet (3.0 to 4.6 m), the internal stack areas were many shelves of about six-foot (1.8 m) height, stacked internally, so that while the public access area was about two floors plus the Science and Technology alcove, the internal stacks were approximately five or six floors. To fix this would have required substantial renovation, a cost the city was not willing to cover, especially after hours of operation were cut in response to the 1978 property tax reduction measure Proposition 13.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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