One of the best things about living where I do is the close proximity of some pretty good libraries. One of my favorites is an old girl who waits for me down the hill a ways, close enough that my motorcycle hardly gets warm before I’m steering into the parking lot.
Pasadena’s Central Library was laid down at the peak of the Jazz Era, when the town had settled into its role as an affluent resting place for the wealthy of Los Angeles and anybody else with money who didn’t want to winter in the snow. They didn’t scrimp on the place, and it shows to this day.
One of the best things about living where I do is the close proximity of some pretty good libraries. One of my favorites is an old girl who waits for me down the hill a ways, close enough that my motorcycle hardly gets warm before I’m steering into the parking lot.
Pasadena’s Central Library was laid down at the peak of the Jazz Era, when the town had settled into its role as an affluent resting place for the wealthy of Los Angeles and anybody else with money who didn’t want to winter in the snow. They didn’t scrimp on the place, and it shows to this day.Entered from the south side, the library gives a visitor the immediate impression of having entered a richly paneled cathedral; fill a good-sized church with reading tables, replace the altar with a reference desk and you get the idea of the room. The librarian on duty presides over an expanse of polished walnut and cork flooring that seems to go on forever.
To the left and right of the reference desk are the chapels of this cathedral, each of which constitutes a separate journey into reference materials and another look into the architectural mind of the period, a time of grand and even magnificent public spaces whose function was as much as anything to embody a particular spirit. You can see what they thought of themselves when this place was built, and what they thought a library ought to represent. The carpeted rooms sound a deep note of dignity and certainly of purpose; this is not merely a storehouse of books but the home of Literature, of Knowledge, the accumulation of the ages. Libraries used to think of themselves that way, and this one certainly looks the part.
Notwithstanding all that, the place has a great warmth that calls the visitor back again and again. I spent nearly a decade working in a glass-walled garret a block from here, and often came to services at this church of the written word on days when the atmosphere of business got too thick for comfort.
On a summer afternoon the best place to read is in the shade of the little plaza near the coffee kiosk at the south side; in winter take your novel or magazine to the History Room, find a place near a window and let the time melt away. I recommend you sit at the ancient oaken roll top desk; pull open its drawers and wonder, as I have, what some librarian might have stored in them. The room smells of reading, the lamps glow pleasantly and the hours pass in their own good time.
A little ways off, at the chancel of this cathedral, the librarian sits at her desk in the glow of a very un-medieval computer screen. When I first came here the desk had only a blotter and a pad of paper and whatever the librarian brought to it in her mind. How different now– I don’t think they could have comprehended it, the builders of this place. Still, the computer casts its magic glow as the walls take it all in, as they have for three quarters of a century.
These days I find myself coming through the doors not fleeing work but seeking it; they’ve made me an intern here, a novitiate in a cathedral where I’ve worshipped many years. If the librarians here recognize me or recall my odd questions from the past, they don’t let on. I am not so much concerned with doing a good job for myself as for the sake of these old walls; I still think of the library in the old-fashioned sense and want very much to live up to that standard. I don’t know if it will be the same, coming here when my term of work is over; I hope I don’t lose this place as I have known it.
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