One Year Later : Wounds of the Library Fire Slow to Heal

It may have taken only one book, and only one match.

But by 11 a.m. on a warm Tuesday morning, April 29, 1986, when the alarms started clanging through the venerable, rattletrap Los Angeles Central Library, that book--or whatever it had been--was already cinders. And the person who had put flame to paper was already gone.

In the next six blazing hours, the city’s 60-year-old flagship library--a three-story treasure house of fact and fancy and trivia and truth, stored along shabby walkways, beneath muraled walls--became a smoking shambles of dead, sodden books.

Devastating Losses

It was, wrote librarian Billie M. Connor, “like we’d died and gone to see if Dante knew what he was writing about.”

The losses were devastating: $22 million, more than 375,000 volumes--the equivalent contents of four urban libraries--destroyed. And of the remaining books, three-quarters of a million were damaged by water or smoke, and threatened by rot.

But people reacted to the sight of history ablaze on a downtown street as if it were a below-the-belt kick at civilization itself.

The fire prompted the biggest spontaneous outburst of civic energy since the Olympics. The can-do adrenaline brought 1,500 volunteers out in a frantic four-day race to box the soggy volumes for flash-freezing, the only technique that could save them.

Some of that buoyancy remains: the public has rallied to raise more than $7 million in the “Save the Books” campaign--money gathered through corporate donations and school kids’ dollars, a Bastille Day dinner and a walkathon in a rainstorm, and mail orders from as far away as France for “Save the Books” sweat shirts.

But the people and the books that made it a library are everywhere--and nowhere.

The 371 staffers who had worked at Central are scattered--222 remain, while the others are farmed out to some of the 62 branch libraries, working in borrowed offices in the Arco Towers and at the UCLA Library, or laboring to inventory the 602,000 intact and warehoused books.

Difficult Period

All have suffered emotionally--depression, nightmares, the stress of wondering who set the fire and another, smaller blaze that broke out four months later, destroying 25,000 more books and causing $2 million in damage.

“Someone kicked us when we were down,” noted Principal Librarian Helene Mochedlover.

A temporary library is not due to open until next spring, and an enlarged Central Library--planned long before the fire--is at least four years off.

In the meantime, demands once met at Central are being heaped on branch and outlying libraries. Central Library, which once loaned nearly 4,000 items each year, is now a debtor: Last year, it had to borrow 7,000 items to meet patrons’ increasing needs.

For every month of waiting, there are costs. Storing the books takes about $43,000 a month. And basic questions are still unanswered: Exactly what was burned, what survived, and how--or if--it can be replaced.

And worst of all, to those who want a functioning public library again, the person who set the fire--someone so feared that the addresses of warehouses sheltering the remaining books are guarded like trade secrets--is still out there.

“If it happened twice,” Mochedlover said, “it could happen again.”

The day after the first fire, when the blaze was reduced to steaming heaps of books and 350 weary firefighters had finally gone home, the librarians moved back in.

It was anything but business as usual.

“There was that immediate challenge the week or two after the fire to salvage as much as we could,” said Central Library Director Betty Gay. “There was a lot of adrenaline and a lot of sense of purpose.” But as days passed, staffers went through “a very natural mourning period.”

“It’s very difficult being a librarian without a library,” said Fontayne Holmes, senior librarian for interlibrary loans. “We missed the building, but most of all we missed the books.”

The staff had always complained about Central Library’s antiquated electrical system, dim lighting, crowding of people and books and poor ventilation that made long Los Angeles summers sheer torture.

Worse Situation

The library fire didn’t improve matters.

“Working conditions have been very difficult,” Gay said. In soot, smoky trash and broken glass, staffers worked to pack damaged books and reorganize the 370,000 items that remain on the shelves.

Some librarians reported ailments like pneumonia, bronchitis and viruses; danger from asbestos insulation became a major concern.

The blaze brought down asbestos-laden debris, and late last summer, state safety inspectors ordered it removed, prompting some staffers to ask to be relocated during the three-week process.

Some, like messenger clerk Ted Itagaki, remain troubled. “We’re talking (cleanup) five months after the fire. What was it (the hazard) one day, two days, one month after the fire?”

It only added to the staffers’ sense of siege, as did the September fire, which erupted when the library was closed to the public, prompting arson investigators to administer lie-detector tests to library staff and security.

“I think everybody understood intellectually why it was necessary,” Gay said, “but at the same time, it was difficult.”

Hard to Believe

The notion that a library person might have started the fire sent a disbelieving shudder through the staff. “I couldn’t believe any library staff member would be guilty of that,” Connor said.

And always, there was a sense of isolation.

About 3,500 people had used the library every day; within 24 hours of the first fire, there were none. The staffers “are used to dealing with people,” said library spokesman Robert G. Reagan. “Very few of them work behind the scenes. Now everyone is behind the scenes.”

Holmes said, “There’s such a difference between a live library and a dead library.”

To cope, there is team spirit. A computer printout wrapped around the history room desk proclaims: “The Library Lives! Fire Cannot Destroy Ideals.”

And there is gallows humor. In the general reading room, staffers hung a sign: “Embers Lounge”--for embers only, of course. Taped over a broken clock is a notice: “Time Ran Out.” In the wake of frustrating delays, their guild magazine reported wryly, “There’s no truth to the rumor that there is a new (library) administrative unit called ‘Success Control.’ ”

Stacked 37 feet high in one of two secret warehouses, next to the frozen fish and the plum juice, are the bulk of 50,000 double-boxed cartons containing 702,000 frozen books.

The books--some still soot-smudged--are waiting at zero degrees Fahrenheit, under the eerie golden glow of cold-storage lamps, for a temporary library site and a $2.5-million-plus contract to thaw them out. No one knows how many can be salvaged.

The hasty packing job is obvious: “You’ll have a book on 1949 nautical flags and next to it, the architecture of the 17th Century,” observed Gaynel Rader, co-owner of the freezer.

Even defrosted, the books will pose another problem: they are fragile. They should always be kept at 50% humidity and 70-degree temperatures, Gay said, a costly need that will require some changes in library plans.

On five-foot-square pallets in a third secret warehouse are the dirty but intact books. Here, librarians have become warehousers.

“I never had training as a warehouse manager,” smiled senior languages department librarian Rolando Pasquinelli.

A Fourth Catalogued

Since February, more than a quarter of those 602,000 books have been catalogued, at the rate of seven pallets a day, each stacked man-high in cartons.

Books are logged in like survivors checked against a passenger list in a six-step procedure that includes cleaning, checking them against cards in old, high-legged card cabinets, and reboxing them, after measuring how much shelf space they will take up.

Dorothy Mewshaw’s right biceps usually ache at day’s end. “It’s tiring physically, but it’s nice to be working with the books,” said the 24-year veteran librarian. “We’ve found things we were afraid might have been burned.”

A new computerized catalogue system will make it perhaps “the only major library that knows what it has,” library spokesman Reagan said. “And we have the opportunity to rebuild the collection.”

It is not just an opportunity--it is a need.

The literature and fiction sections together lost nearly 45,000 volumes, at a replacement cost of up to $27 each. The science and technology section, the hardest hit, lost almost 90,000 items, averaging $38 each. The complete patents collection could cost half a million dollars to replace.

“There will be things we are never able to replace,” said Mariana Reith, technical services director. “It’s going to take a decade. It will come back to being as good, but different.”

And a year later, none of the books, whether burned or safely boxed, are helping anyone.

“Every week we find one or two items that we cannot find in any of the (California) libraries that were only at L.A. Central. Every day in every week it hits us, what is missing,” Holmes said. “We hope they’re in those boxes someplace.”

Disruption in Service

The disruption of services has been one of the fire’s biggest impacts, sending a tremor through the ranks of both regular patrons and the 62 branch libraries, where circulation is up 10%.

Sometimes the problem is books that can’t be found elsewhere; sometimes it is information that once could be had by a single phone call to Central.

It can take 30% more time to answer loan requests by going through libraries as far away as Harvard University. Some charge patrons $15 for borrowing services that would have been free through Central, and it can take 15 days just to find whether a book is available, said Joanna Johnson, assistant director of the branches.

The one unalloyed bright note in the last year is fund raising.

Led by an immediate gesture by Atlantic Richfield Co.--which has donated money, staff time, printing costs and training for a 25-librarian speakers bureau and which also pays the $63,000-a-month rent for the library’s Arco Towers offices--civic groups and private citizens followed suit, with donations that now top $7 million and should reach the $10-million goal by year’s end, said J. Carlton Norris, Arco’s head of community affairs.

Book losses alone totaled $15 million. The other $5 million will likely be made up from prearranged book donations.

Variety of Sources

Money has seemed to come from everywhere: $103,000 from Los Angeles schools’ “Bucks for Books”; $22,710 from a Lakers’ intrasquad game; $10,613 from a rainy-day walkathon. A 51-hour nationwide telethon on the Rev. Gene Scott’s show earned about $2 million, with donations ranging from a child’s 40 cents to $30,000 from Chase Manhattan Bank.

But for the fund-raisers, there were disappointments as well.

“We had not anticipated some of the turndowns we got,” including one from Disney, Norris said. “That was disappointing. They were probably one of the greatest users of the library.” Early on, with booster-like zeal Arco and others had wanted to cover the smoke smudges and paint a bright “thermometer”--to mark fund-raising progress--on the limestone and stucco west facade of the library, Gay said.

Art conservators vetoed the idea, she said; there was no guarantee that the paint would not permanently stain the historic building.

And there was concern that out of sight would mean out of mind. As long as the smoke smudges remained, the fire would not be forgotten. “It seems better,” Gay said, “to have it sitting there as a reminder.”

Last summer, when one of the big fans in Central Library broke down, someone joked that never mind, they wouldn’t be in the same building next summer anyway.

It is nearly summer, 1987, and they are still there.

A year after the fire, Mochedlover said, “We don’t seem to be any closer to anything, although we are assured we are.”

The frustration is born of the tangled history of planned--and consistently delayed--renovations.

For the last two decades, city officials have bickered over whether to tear it down, restore it or expand it, and whether its historical merit warranted tolerating its archaic internal design.

Finally, in July, 1985, there was a decision. The old library would be spared--enlarged and reorganized--as part of a multimillion-dollar commercial development. Maguire Thomas Partners, in exchange for approval to build two immense office towers, would pay the Community Redevelopment Agency millions of dollars to finance the library’s renovation.

Construction was to begin in April, 1986. It didn’t. At first, delays were blamed on bureaucratic snafus; then, Maguire Thomas pushed the project back nine months to firm up leases with office tower tenants.

Deadline for Payment

The firm says it will meet a June 15 deadline to pay the city $26.9 million, the first installment toward library reconstruction.

But in the interim has come yet another potential delay.

On Feb. 26, the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission, charged with approving the design of buildings on city property, got its first real look at architect Norman Pfeiffer’s library addition plans. They didn’t like what they saw--a peaked, skylighted roof wrapped in patterned, etched metal, the entire addition clad in green terra-cotta and stucco.

“Our concerns are numerous,” said Merry Norris, commission president. “The mass of the new wing, the size of the atrium, the choice of materials, the facade on Grand Street. . . .”

The commission voted to reject the design but then, concerned that such a vote would halt the project altogether, decided to approve it, conditional on 10 major changes.

Pfeiffer said his firm has yet to begin redrawing its plans, but he questioned whether the building could be reduced in mass--as the commission wishes--and still fulfill the library’s needs.

Fall Demolition Planned

Despite the controversy, Pfeiffer expects initial demolition work at the library to begin in the fall, when the library staff will move to temporary quarters in the old Bullock’s building at Broadway and 7th Street. The lease for that building has yet to be signed--and the cost has risen from $6.5 million to more than $8 million in recent months--but a formal agreement is expected next month.

Estimates for the opening of the temporary library range over the first six months of 1988, and for the permanent library, across the entire year of 1991, depending on whose timetable is consulted.

The price of delays, in human currency, is incalculable.

“Right after the fire, it was incredible,” Mochedlover said. “People were really emotional. And now I still think people are messed up. . . . It’s like having a death in the family, and it just continues.”