Louisville Free Public Library

About this property

The Louisville Main Library is the main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library (LFPL), the largest public library system in Kentucky. Located at Fourth and York streets in SoBro, adjacent to downtown Louisville, the building comprises a 1906 Carnegie library designed by Pilcher and Tachau in the Beaux-Arts style (the South Building) and a 1969 addition by Louis and Henry Architects (the North Building). It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 27, 1980. The Louisville Free Public Library was established in 1902 by an act of the Kentucky State Legislature and merged with the Polytechnic Society of Kentucky in 1904. With the promise of a grant from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, acquired through the efforts of Louisville's Scottish Society, construction of a permanent building at the York Street site began in 1905. The building was designed by the New York City firm of Pilcher and Tachau (the latter, William S. Tachau, was a native Louisvillian) and completed in 1906, though construction worker strikes delayed the opening of patron services until 1908. The building is considered one of the finest examples of Beaux-Arts architecture in Kentucky. The main entrance leads to the Delivery Room (now the foyer), a two-story space in the Louis XVI style featuring a stained-glass barrel vaulted ceiling, white marble columns, neo-Renaissance murals by Theodore L. Wilberg, and two staircases with bronze and iron railings. The building's open stack room, which allowed patrons direct access to the shelves rather than requesting books from a closed collection, was an innovation at the time and proved a popular feature upon opening. In addition to its book collection, the library originally housed a natural history museum in its basement (open to the public from 1908), an armory containing Daniel Boone's rifle along with medieval weapons and armor, collections of American Indian weapons and beads, and numerous paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculptures. The building was also the first local home of Tchaenhotep, an Egyptian mummy purchased by Lt. Governor Samuel Thruston Ballard after the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and placed on display at the library. The natural history collections were relocated in 1971 to what is now the Kentucky Science Center. A bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln, the third and final casting of a work by sculptor George Grey Barnard, was donated by Isaac W. Bernheim and his wife Amanda and dedicated in 1922 at the west end of the building facing Fourth Street. Ida B. Tarbell, the Lincoln biographer and muckraking journalist, attended the dedication ceremony. It is a long-held tradition that rubbing Lincoln's toe brings good luck.

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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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