Biblioteca Carnegie

About this property

The Biblioteca Carnegie (or Carnegie Library) on Avenida Juan Ponce de León in Puerta de Tierra, San Juan, Puerto Rico is a NRHP-listed Carnegie library funded through a $100,000 donation from the Carnegie Foundation, becoming Puerto Rico's first purpose-built library when it was completed in 1915. In 1901, then-Education Commissioner, Martin Grove Brumbaugh, initiated talks with Andrew Carnegie with the purpose of building a public library in San Juan, as part of the United States' Puerto Rican education program. For this, the San Juan municipal legislature had agreed to give $6,000 for maintenance expenses. Carnegie's private secretary, James Bertram, indicated that the amount usually donated was 10 times the promised maintenance expenses. Nevertheless, Brumbaugh obtained the $100,000 amount. This was in part due to then-Governor Arthur Yager's friendship with Carnegie himself. Its origins stem from the Insular Library created in 1903, created by the then-new civil government, which itself came from the military-rule era San Juan Free Library, which was a merger of five pre-existing libraries under Spanish-rule: the library of the Dominican and Franciscan monasteries, the Real Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, the library of the Provincial Council and Treasury Department of Puerto Rico, the library of the Royal College of Lawyers-General Secretary and the library of the Institute of Secondary Education and Normal School. It has a Classical Revival stylings and was designed and built by the Puerto Rican engineer Ramón Carbia in 1914, when work on the project commenced on land donated by the Puerto Rico government. In June 1916, the collection of the Insular Library, which had previously been known as the San Juan Public Library, was transferred to the building, and the library, which was named Biblioteca Carnegie, was inaugurated on 27 July, when the Puerto Rican government formally accepted the donation. From 1917 until 2010, the library was administered by the Department of Education. In its first forty years, the library had nine reading rooms, membership, and an average of 200 daily visitors. Under the 222 Law of 1946 $6,000 was made available to the library's board of trustees with the intention of establishing the Biblioteca Rodante ("Library on Wheels"). The then-Department of Public Instruction was authorized to organize and equip the Biblioteca Rodante, which offered its services via cajas viajeras ("travelling boxes"), which were shelves used to carry books to isolated schools and communities. The project started in 1948 under the direction of Federico Porrata Doría, Francisco Porrata-Doría's brother, with two vehicles carrying books for children and adults, as users ranged from elementary-level school children to adults aged eighty to ninety-years old.

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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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