Building On Optimism : San Francisco’s Elegant New Library Is One Part of the City’s Rebirth

Almost 60 years ago a 9-year-old boy who had fled Nazi Germany found light in the Chicago Public Library. There, amid spy thrillers and mysteries, James Ingo Freed taught himself to read English. Mies van der Rohe, the great architect, later taught Freed the idiom of modern design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

These two formative influences are fused in the soaring void at the heart of the new $137-million San Francisco Public Library, where light floods into a 60-foot-wide atrium, dancing off glass walls and moving through open spaces as it falls five stories to the limestone floor below. Through the large oval skylight, the pale stone in the library’s center will mirror the outside atmosphere.

In the same way, the building itself, which has its grand opening today, will reflect the city’s diversity in the most public of its new spaces: There are special study rooms for the African American, Chinese and Filipino communities; centers for the blind and the deaf; the first archive of gay material in a public library; and free Internet access for the masses. “We were always the poor stepchild of the other cultural institutions in town,” said Steve Coulter, president of the Library Commission. “It’s a whole new day for the library.”

Far more than merely replacing the grand but terribly outdated Beaux Arts library across the street, the New Main marks the spring of a public building boom in San Francisco, a civic rebirth of optimism and elegance tarnished by the 1989 earthquake and the long recession. From the reclaimed South of Market neighborhood that holds the Yerba Buena Gardens and the Museum of Modern Art, which opened last year, to the recently expanded Legion of Honor museum in Lincoln Park, the city is sprucing itself up after a long period of civic doldrums. Indeed, the new library, across a park from the Palladian City Hall, fulfills Daniel Burham’s almost century-old “city beautiful” design for the civic center.

The library fills a block that had been largely empty ever since the original City Hall burned down in the fire after the 1906 earthquake (90 years ago to the day of the opening), which also consumed 138,000 library books. The new edifice is clad in white granite from the quarry that furnished the material for the civic center’s other monuments.

Freed, a principal at New York’s Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and best known for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, decided against copying the classic styling of the other buildings. Instead, he created a postmodern echo of the 1916 library in the new one. In place of massive Ionic columns he flattened the facade, inscribed it with a geometric grid and pressed four stainless-steel pilasters topped with I-beams into the surface. The back side of the building, which faces the commercial riot of Market Street, was designed in a more starkly modern style with the grid pattern making it look like a giant bleached Mondrian.

Freed said he was striving to create a warm and inviting place, the antithesis of the traditional grim and gray public building, as well as balancing the two competing requirements of a library: the spiritual freedom involved in the pursuit of knowledge and the curatorial need for order. “Old libraries told stories of power. But great tombs are no longer our forte,” said Freed, who was assisted by the local firm of Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris. “We needed a place for communities to celebrate their own essences.”

The library is twice as large as its predecessor and will eventually hold up to 1.5 million books, a 50% increase, in its 32 miles of stacks. Its children’s center, which serves as a de facto day-care room for the children of the Tenderloin neighborhood, is larger than any of the city’s branch libraries and will have books in more than 50 languages. Visitors are expected to triple to 12,000 a day, computer workstations will increase from 20 to 300--or as many as the Los Angeles and Chicago libraries combined--and there are 500 additional desk outlets to plug your own laptop into the Internet.

But the library is more than just books and bytes. There is an auditorium, community meeting rooms, a cafe and a gift shop. There are also several commissioned works of art, such as one that features 50,000 cards from the library’s old catalog that have been annotated with quotes from the books they list and plastered on a wall that runs three stories through the building. “We think of it as a community center for San Francisco,” said Sherry Thomas, executive director of the Friends of the Library. “There’s a changing role for the library in this city because of this building.”

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The building is part of a national boom in public library construction--the third great wave of such building. The first occurred in the early years of the century when Andrew Carnegie helped build a public library in every community that wanted one--a number that eventually reached 1,679. After the end of World War II an affluent America set about updating its libraries, many of which now stand overcrowded and under-wired for the information age. The current boom started when Chicago opened its massive Harold Washington Library Center in 1991; Los Angeles unveiled its revamped library in 1993 after two arson fires devastated the original landmark.

Last year alone, libraries opened in Denver, Phoenix and San Antonio. Portland, Ore., and Cleveland are building libraries, and San Diego just approved a new one. “There’s a renaissance in public libraries,” said George Needham, executive director of the Public Library Assn. in Chicago. “There’s a real thirst in this country for public monuments.”

The New Main, as the San Francisco library is known, has been getting mixed reviews. The architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Allan Temko, called it a great book with a bad cover. In that respect it is the opposite of the old library, which was a real beauty on the outside but was dark and cramped inside--a urinal with bookshelves, a local paper called it. The 1989 earthquake was the last blow for the sad old building, which is slated to become the new home for the Asian Art Museum.

The basic construction cost comes from a bond measure that raised $104.5 million for the new building, and private money is expected to cover the furnishings and equipment. The Friends of the Library set $30 million as its goal, hit a wall halfway there and then decided to reach out to communities that usually weren’t hit up for cash. It worked.

“Libraries are very democratic institutions,” Thomas said. “We thought we’d fail if we didn’t reach out to everyone.” About $2 million came from cold calling the 450,000 library card holders, a page taken from the Los Angeles fund-raising campaign. A six-figure donation came from a man who saw a pitch from the library on Cantonese television.

These contributions are showcased in the 11 so-called affinity rooms that highlight special collections, although the Latino-Hispanic fund-raising committee opted to sponsor a meeting room instead of a study center. The result, said the Library Commission’s Coulter, is that the new institution is far more inclusive and less elitist than the old one. “We were trying to involve groups that have not been traditionally involved,” he said. “They’ve gone from being occasional patrons to being investors in the library.”

Thomas attributes the fund-raising success to the fact that the public library is a great common denominator of American life. “Almost everyone had some experience in a library that they recognized as pivotal, almost everyone can touch a place in them where a library meant something to them,” she said. “The opera would have had a harder time doing something like this.”

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In a striking circular room on the third floor, the ceiling is given over to a sepia-colored trompe l’oeil mural in which gay men and lesbians hoist flags and a marching band plays before a stone staircase engraved with the names of homosexuals in history: Socrates, Vasco de Gama, Machiavelli. Books fly toward the heavens in the middle of the painting, by Charley Brown and Mark Evans.

Named after James C. Hormel, the heir to the Spam fortune who donated $500,000 to kick off the effort, the study center will function as a gateway to the library’s collection of material about homosexuality. Forty years ago at the University of Chicago, the only books on the subject that Hormel could find described his sexual orientation as a pathology. The new center will house the papers of journalist Randy Shilts, whose books include his history of the AIDS epidemic, “And the Band Played On”; material from documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein (“Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt”) and Peter Adair (“Word Is Out”); the archives of Naiad Press, which publishes books by lesbians; as well as a collection of pulp paperbacks from the 1950s such as “Satan Was a Lesbian.”

Hormel was surprised by the support he found: Money and archival contributions poured in from across the country, and the $1.6-million target was exceeded by $1.2 million. The center, he said, has struck a chord even before its opening.

“Self-esteem is very important to a group that has been so neglected in history,” he said. “People will discover that they aren’t alone in the world, that they have value and that people like them have made enormous contributions to the world.”