ANAHEIM : A Carnegie Legacy Houses City History

The small, brick and stucco building known to old-timers as the Carnegie Library is a bit out of place in the shadows of the polished glass and granite of the Civic Center’s high-rises.

Built in 1908 with a $10,000 grant from steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, the structure, with its entrance way adorned with Greek-style columns, is on the National Registry of Historic Buildings. Of the four Carnegie libraries that were built in Orange County from 1903 to 1913, it is the last remaining.

Today, it is the home of the Anaheim Museum. The building has rooms that were designed to be functional, and many would call them rather nondescript. That is, unless you spent your childhood reading there.

“We get a lot of people here who say, ‘I haven’t been here since I was a little kid,’ ” said Susan Liu, the museum’s registrar. “There are a lot of memories in this building.”

The library was built in an era when such facilities were springing up throughout the country, thanks mostly to Carnegie, who made a $500-million fortune running his Pennsylvania steel company. He wound up giving away $350 million to various causes, but biographers say he was most proud of the libraries he built.

“I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people because they give nothing for nothing,” Carnegie, who died in 1919, once said. “They only help those who help themselves.”

To be eligible for a Carnegie grant, a city had to agree to donate the land and pay 10% of the cost of the library’s construction. A group of 75 Anaheim business leaders raised about $2,000 for the land and for its portion of the construction bill.

The library opened on Jan. 7, 1909, replacing Anaheim’s previous library, which had been located on a spare wall in Bruce’s Candy Store. The store’s owner received $12 a month to check out books while selling his gumdrops.

In conjunction with the new library’s opening, the city hired F.S. Armstrong to run it at a salary of $50 a month. Described in one newspaper account as the “custodian of the books and janitor,” Armstrong quit in a huff two years later when the City Council rejected his request that his salary be raised to $2 a day.

By the late 1950s, Disneyland had opened and Anaheim’s population had grown from 15,000 to 105,000 in less than 10 years. It was apparent that the building could no longer accommodate a library the size Anaheim would need.

In 1960, city voters approved a $1.1-million bond measure to build the current Central Library at Harbor Boulevard and Broadway.

On Dec. 5, 1963, the books were transferred out of the Carnegie building, and it was converted into offices for the city’s Personnel Department.

In 1987, seven years after the personnel office left, the museum took over the building at 241 S. Anaheim Blvd. Today it houses exhibits on Anaheim’s history.