This post is the eleventh in a series of excerpts serializing the book Feels Like Home.
Chapter 5
Post-Fire Memories: Rio Vista, Spring Street, etc. - part 1 by Bob Anderson - Librarian, Literature & Fiction Department
In the aftermath of the April 29 fire, most of the Central Library staff continued to work in the dusty, smoky building for over a year, at least part-time. The post-fire volunteers had packed up most of the books in the building’s closed stacks, but those in the reading rooms, which had almost no smoke or water damage, remained on the shelves, as did those in a few places in the stacks that the Fire Dept. had declared off-limits.
Once the initial rush was over, the staff eventually began to inventory and box these remaining books. The inventory was done using cards from the card catalogs in the various departments, since it was clear that those catalogs were never again going to be used for their intended purpose, with so much of the collection destroyed or damaged.
After a week or so we were also given permission to pack and box some of the volumes in the areas that had previously been declared off-limits. I know that this process took a number of months, because when the mysterious second fire took place in the Music Dept. reading room early in September, those books were still on the shelves and were either destroyed or damaged. The staff also worked on other projects like ordering new books and converting some of our card indexes to Inmagic files. (We had just a handful of computers in the building, and of course, all these new files had to be backed up daily on floppy disks.)
Administrative staff were offered office space by Arco across the street, so they moved over there, and SCAN (Southern California Answering Network, a regional reference service) eventually relocated to UCLA. The Catalog Dept. moved to offices in what was then the First Interstate Tower (now the Aon Center). The weekly branch book committee meetings (where a rotating committee of library staff decided which Central Library purchases should be listed on the branch order sheet) was moved to the office of Barbara Jacobs, head of Acquisitions, at the library’s Anderson Street building. The new books that continued to arrive were boxed up after being cataloged.
While all the water-damaged books had been sent off to cold storage for eventual freeze-drying, there were pallets and pallets (many hundreds of thousands) of dry books that had to be stored for an extended period of time, so eventually the Rio Vista warehouse was located for that purpose. Rio Vista Street is the first street east of the Los Angeles River (thus the name) off of Olympic Blvd. The warehouse was a one-story structure in a neighborhood of other warehouses (plus the old Sears Building on Olympic at Soto). It had a fairly small office at the front, and a loading dock and the rest was just open floor space.
Once the books had been moved there (along with the departmental card catalogs), Central Library staff started going there a couple of days a week to inventory (and clean—many of the books had smoke residue, etc.) all those volumes. We were all assigned to certain shifts (Mon-Wed and Tues-Thurs), I think, and Rolando Pasquinelli and Linda Moussa were in charge of the operation on alternate days. This schedule of part-time at Central, part-time at Rio went on for quite a few months.
Eventually (it was pretty far into 1987 by this time), all the furniture had to be moved out of Central Library, plus the staff who still worked there part-time. Leslie Nordby (at that time the Principal at Municipal Reference) was in charge of the various move operations that occurred, and Jane Nowak (the Senior in Fiction) was in charge of getting everything packed up, which entailed a lot of committees, a lot of meetings, the design of labels designating what department every piece of furniture belonged to, etc., etc. Much of the furniture went to another warehouse, this one multi-story, not too far from Rio Vista. I was only there once or twice so can’t remember exactly where it was. Frank Louck and Dave Cerlian were the ones who spent the most time there.
Much of the Central Library staff also moved full-time to Rio Vista, along with just enough furniture to give them a place to sit and work. This was mostly tables and chairs from the library reading rooms. Each department had its own little area (a few tables with chairs facing each other) which we called pods. There was not enough room for the entire staff (or enough for everyone to do), so some librarians and clerks were temporarily reassigned to branches. I went off to Municipal Reference at City Hall East, where I worked at their reference desk and also spent time ordering fiction materials and adding to the California fiction file on Inmagic. One day a week I would go to Anderson Street, where I worked on the many gift books received in the aftermath of the fire. Since we had only a vague idea of which books had survived, we added pretty much any gifts from the areas of the collection we knew had major fire and water damage. We kept a card file of the items we’d added, in order not to end up with fifteen copies of best-sellers. After a few months of this, Jane Nowak was promoted to Principal in History, and I moved over to Rio Vista to be acting senior and stayed for the duration.
The Rio Vista building certainly had its disadvantages, but it was not all gloom and doom, though. We did have perhaps three computers to continue our work on the Inmagic databases. I remember going through a Wilson Fiction Catalog and marking it for a big order of classics to be purchased with Save the Books money. One of the librarians, Stephanie Beverage (later director of Huntington Beach Library) would hold a daily exercise class for staff. Sometimes a group of us would walk down Soto to have lunch at Mike’s Hockeyburger; other times we ate in a bit more style at the nearby Rusty’s Hacienda Mexican restaurant. Many of us substituted at branches from time to time. And, at burned-out Central, Rio Vista, and Spring Street, the Children’s Literature staff periodically entertained us with morale-boosting puppet shows in which the various puppets represented members of the staff—including, of course, library administration. Almost everyone (even me!) became a puppet show character at one time or another. We got all the dry books inventoried, and also went through a lot of smoke-damaged periodicals, tossing any that did not have pictorial value and could be replaced with microfilm.
Meanwhile, since the renovation of Central Library (already in the planning stage before the fires) would take a number of years, the question of where a temporary Central could be opened was unresolved for a long time. Administration looked at various downtown buildings (and at that time there were MANY vacant office buildings downtown), but most had to be ruled out because they were not constructed to hold the weight of all those books and shelves. At one point we were supposed to move to the old Bullock’s Department Store building, but not long before we left Central that plan fell through and when we dispersed to Rio Vista, branches, etc., we had no idea when or where Central would reopen. Librarians Helene Mochedlover and Renny Day often wrote theme songs for this era based on classic show tunes, and I remember the one at the final party/puppet show at old Central was based on the “Paint Your Wagon” song: “Where’re we goin’, we don’t know; when’ll we get there, we ain’t certain, all we know is we are on our way.”
(Editor’s Note: Continue the saga of exile to find out where they end up in next week’s entry!)
Robert Anderson became a librarian in what was then the Fiction Department of Los Angeles Public Library in 1980. In 1991 he was selected as Fiction Subject Specialist for the Literature and Fiction Department and has held that position since then. He was, rather ironically, working on a weeding project in the Central Library closed stacks on the day of the 1986 fire, and he considers the subsequent seven years that ended in the Grand Reopening to be the most traumatic but also the most transforming and inspiring of his life and career.
Feels Like Home: Reflections on Central Library: Photographs From the Collection of Los Angeles Public Library (2018) is a tribute to Central Library and follows the history from its origins as a mere idea to its phoenix-like reopening in 1993. Published by Photo Friends of the Los Angeles Public Library, it features both researched historical accounts and first-person remembrances. The book was edited by Christina Rice, Senior Librarian of the LAPL Photo Collection, and Literature Librarians Sheryn Morris and James Sherman.The book can be purchased through the Library Foundation of Los Angeles Bookstore.