Library Marks 60 Years of Lending Adventures

Growing up in North Hollywood in the 1930s, Vera Arndt found countless hours of entertainment at the Sidney Lanier Regional Library.

The books she found there transported her to the high seas, where pirates pillaged merchant ships, and to deserted islands, where Robinson Crusoe and other unfortunate sailors fought the elements in their struggles to survive.

Arndt was one of nearly 75 North Hollywood residents who gathered Sunday to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the library, now known as the North Hollywood/Amelia Earhart Regional Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

The library has changed tremendously during its 60-year history, said Arndt and other celebrants who remembered the facility’s early days. In addition to its new name, it has more than twice as much space, technology that links it to the central library and a vast number of services to meet the needs of a different population.

Brick Building

The one-story, Mission-style brick building with Spanish tile work was opened in 1929 to replace a storefront operation known as the Sepulveda Library, which could not meet the demand caused by the area’s rapid population growth.

Officials named the new facility after Lanier, an obscure 19th-Century Southern poet, because the books from the Sepulveda Library were already coded SL, and librarians did not want to relabel them, said Joyce Elliott, regional manager of the library.

“Someone went looking for an American literary figure with the right initials,” Elliott said.

In 1981, however, at the suggestion of a local resident, officials renamed the library for Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Earhart, who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean on an attempted around-the-world flight in 1937, lived in nearby Toluca Lake for several years when she was in her 20s.

On the south wall of the building, there is a quote from a Lanier poem that could have been written for Earhart. “I am but a small winged bird, but I will conquer the world.”

In 1957, the library building more than doubled in size with the addition of three rooms paid for by a city bond issue.

Once local residents wishing to tap the central library’s resources had to make the trip downtown, recalled Bill Coenig, 75, who has been using the North Hollywood Library for more than half a century. Now, computers link patrons directly to the central library’s catalogue, and librarians there ship books to the regional branches.

“Now, you can do almost anything here that you could do at the downtown library,” said Coenig, president of the Friends of the North Hollywood Library.

Outreach Programs

Coenig also noted that the library has outreach programs and services to cater to the changed population of the east San Fernando Valley. Once serving an almost entirely white, affluent population, the library now has a collection of Spanish-language books, prints all promotional literature in English and Spanish, and runs literacy programs to help adults improve their reading abilities.

Longtime patrons say that the changes have given the library a different atmosphere, but they are pleased to see it growing and expanding in scope.

“It had a more homey atmosphere,” said Arndt, who now uses the library to keep up on current events rather than to escape into the fantasy world of adventure stories. “It is a city library now, not a local library, but it is nice to see it being cherished and kept up.”