Remnants of Acres of Books help community

When the landmark Long Beach bookstore Acres of Books closed its doors in 2008 to make way for a city redevelopment project, a big question remained: what to do with its acres of bookshelves?

The decision was made to let them live on in a way, even after the bookstore was long gone.

This summer, workers are using hammers to knock down and harvest an estimated 6-1/2 miles of wooden shelving.

Most of the 1930s-era building will be demolished this fall to make way for an art center. But the city is setting aside the old shelves, some 1,500 apple crates and planks that once towered high with as many as 1 million volumes. Once the shelves are dismantled, the wood will be given to the public and provide much-needed building materials for community gardens, bike shelters, city planters and art projects.

The project also aims to furnish something else in short supply these days: summer jobs.

Two dozen green-jobs trainees with the city’s Hire-A-Youth program will earn minimum wage and brave splinters and rusty nails as they take hammers and crowbars to the shelves, extracting as much wood as possible.

“Trying to salvage everything you can deters all this from going into a landfill,” said David Magdangal, 29, a landscape architect and one of the group leaders. “It’s incredibly dirty and dusty, but you get to save something that would otherwise be trashed.”

The history of Acres of Books goes back some eight decades to when bookseller Bertrand Smith moved from Ohio to Long Beach and opened the shop in 1934. In 1960, he moved to the site on Long Beach Boulevard, which previously housed a country-western dance hall and, before that, a car showroom.

The cavernous brick building was crammed with books haphazardly organized in narrow aisles of makeshift shelves that looked as if they might teeter over at any second. For nearly 50 years, the shop was hallowed ground for book lovers, drawing the admiration of science fiction author Ray Bradbury and serving as a prime hunting ground for bookworms seeking hard-to-find editions.

“It was always this mysterious place that I liked to go into, and I still remember that smell,” said Karen Ramirez, 18, a Long Beach City College student working to take apart shelving. “There’s so much history in here, and it’s beautiful.”

The effort to salvage materials from the shop started as a grassroots project that flew under the radar of even the city, which owns the property.

When city officials found out earlier this year that a group of artists, cyclists and gardeners was taking drills, saws, hammers and paintbrushes to the shelving in a renegade art project, they put a stop to it because of liability concerns.

Then city officials launched the salvage effort again, this time under their supervision.

Now the clock is ticking because the ArtExchange, a public-private redevelopment project, is scheduled to break ground on the Acres of Books site in September.

“We’ve basically got this summer to recover as much material as we can,” said Larry Rich, the city’s sustainability coordinator. “We want to give it a proper burial, a respectful end.”

When the ArtExchange opens next year, it will house artist studios, galleries, classrooms and a performance space.

But there should be some familiar sights. The Streamline Moderne facade bearing Bertrand Smith’s name will remain. Wooden roof trusses will be incorporated into the new building. Bricks from the walls of the structure — a designated cultural heritage landmark — will pave the new courtyard.

In an effort to haul out as much of the lumber as possible, the city held a fundraiser Saturday for the art center. For $25, visitors could walk away with a colorful, 60-year-old apple crate filled with books hand-selected from the roughly 30,000 volumes that still remain — and perhaps say their final goodbyes.

tony.barboza@latimes.com