Verdugo Views: Tuesday Afternoon Club was instrumental in development of city library
Glendale’s current library is an “outgrown, outmoded, decaying 55-year old building. It only has 21,000 square feet, and temperatures average 90 degrees inside the library during the summer.”
That’s how Myrtle O. Andersen of the Tuesday Afternoon Club, or TAC, described the city’s Carnegie Library on Harvard Street in the late 1960s.
The irony is that it was this very same club that founded our library.
Here’s the back story: in 1903 TAC members realized that residents of our yet-unincorporated town needed a reading room and a place to borrow reading materials. They spent the next year or so raising funds to bring in a traveling library, provided by the state for small communities without municipal services.
Space was found in a vacant storeroom on Wilson Avenue, and the doors opened on Feb. 26, 1906, just days after residents voted to incorporate as a city.
Books were available without fees for Glendale taxpayers.
By that time, many library buildings throughout the United States had been funded by millionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and word was out that his staff replied more readily to towns with a municipal library in place — no matter how small.
In 1907, with urging from TAC members, the city established a public library, with books and materials provided by the TAC; plus the city hired TAC member Alma Danford as librarian — at a grand salary of $15 a month.
According to Andersen, the TAC initiated negotiations with the Carnegie Corp. News that the city was getting a Carnegie grant arrived in 1913. The grant included a few stipulations: one was that the interior be designed so that one librarian could supervise the entire space from a desk in the middle of the room.
Carnegie also mandated that each library be designed and built by locals. Glendale selected Paul Tuttle, well known for designing many of the “handsome homes in Southern California,” according to a newspaper account of the time.
Tuttle’s Classic Revival design was constructed by Thomas H. Addison, who also built the city’s fire and police stations, the intermediate school, a church and more than 50 Glendale homes.
The Carnegie Library opened on Nov. 13, 1914, and was very popular for many years. But by the mid-1960s, that wonderful Carnegie Library — state of the art in 1914 — was, as Andersen wrote, “outmoded.”
TAC members decided to devote their energies to getting a new building, but their first task was persuading the City Council to act.
This wasn’t their first attempt. They, along with several other civic-minded organizations, including the Women’s Civic League, had been appealing for a new library for the past 20 years.
But they had been unsuccessful, due, mainly, according to Andersen, “to an unsympathetic administration and city council.”
Capital gains funds, which could have been used to build a library, were instead being spent on immediate needs and the library was bypassed, according to Andersen’s report.
The TAC didn’t place all the blame on the city. Andersen wrote, “citizens were apathetic to the need for a new library” and had a strong dislike for “any kind of a bond issue.”
Even though a new library had been on the city planning commission’s priority list for some time, nothing had happened. “Additions and patchwork on the old building had kept it going, therefore to many, we have a library,’’ Andersen added.
This time around, the TAC planned for a successful outcome. So, they got the Glendale News-Press involved.
More to come.
From the readers:
Stuart Ray emailed regarding Verdugo Views, Feb. 10, 2018, on the 1918 flu epidemic: “It would be great if you updated this story by covering the 1957 Asian flu outbreak considered to be only behind 1918 in its impact. I sure got it. It seemed to hit Glendale first and then Burbank, where I lived then.”
Thanks, Ray. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Asian flu, a pandemic outbreak of avian influenza that originated in China in early 1956, lasting until 1958. Originating from mutation in wild ducks combined with a preexisting human strain, it spread to Singapore in February 1957, reached Hong Kong by April and the United States by June. Death toll in the United States was approximately 69,800. The elderly were particularly vulnerable. Estimates of worldwide deaths vary widely depending on source, ranging from 1 million to 4 million.
KATHERINE YAMADA can be reached at katherineyamada@gmail.com. or by mail at Verdugo Views, c/o Glendale News-Press, 202 W. First St., Second Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Please include your name, address and phone number.
