Holy crap! Old Detroit Public Library

[Huggybear]

If you look at the street map and extrapolate the dimensions of that room, it would be cramped and claustrophobic. It was obviously dark, too. The reading area - which looks like it would have been underground - would likely have flooded a few times like the surrounding buildings. And at some point, there was a serious worldwide rebellion against that cast-iron type of interior [[a lot of that was prefab construction) - because not much of it survived the 1950s anywhere in the world.

This building [[the Center Park Library) was built in 1872, and it's likely that by the late 1920s, it was not considered modern enough to coexist with the steel-framed high-rises going up around it. I assume that this, the move of the main library north, and maybe RFC money made it much more palatable to replace it with the Downtown Branch. Consider also that through the early 20th century, Italianate architecture [[and derivations) was a dominant form around downtown [[e.g., Book Building, Book Cadillac, 1300 Beaubien, the DAC, Detroit College of Law, Fine Arts Building, original Opera House, Eaton Tower, Lafayette Building).

The same thing happened with St. Aloysius on Washington - which was originally built in 1870 as a brick Romanesque Presbyterian church [[hence the balcony), sold to the Catholic Church, operated for a few decades, torn down, and rebuilt to mostly the same interior plan using more modern steel construction and a limestone gothic facade [[really very 1930s in its own way). The newspapers of 1930 decried the demolition of the original church. In an article you can see framed on the wall of the current rectory, you can see where the Detroit Free Press remarked that "Downtown Detroit loses one of its few remaining landmarks..."

Which also tells you that some Detroiters are living in the Matrix.

[Gsgeorge]

If you look at the street map and extrapolate the dimensions of that room, it would be cramped and claustrophobic. It was obviously dark, too. The reading area - which looks like it would have been underground - would likely have flooded a few times like the surrounding buildings. And at some point, there was a serious worldwide rebellion against that cast-iron type of interior [[a lot of that was prefab construction) - because not much of it survived the 1950s anywhere in the world.

This building [[the Center Park Library) was built in 1872, and it's likely that by the late 1920s, it was not considered modern enough to coexist with the steel-framed high-rises going up around it. I assume that this, the move of the main library north, and maybe RFC money made it much more palatable to replace it with the Downtown Branch. Consider also that through the early 20th century, Italianate architecture [[and derivations) was a dominant form around downtown [[e.g., Book Building, Book Cadillac, 1300 Beaubien, the DAC, Detroit College of Law, Fine Arts Building, original Opera House, Eaton Tower, Lafayette Building).

The same thing happened with St. Aloysius on Washington - which was originally built in 1870 as a brick Romanesque Presbyterian church [[hence the balcony), sold to the Catholic Church, operated for a few decades, torn down, and rebuilt to mostly the same interior plan using more modern steel construction and a limestone gothic facade [[really very 1930s in its own way). The newspapers of 1930 decried the demolition of the original church. In an article you can see framed on the wall of the current rectory, you can see where the Detroit Free Press remarked that "Downtown Detroit loses one of its few remaining landmarks..."

Which also tells you that some Detroiters are living in the Matrix.

Thanks for the great info! I agree that Detroit has had a history of knocking down its landmarks, dating way back. I am always quick to mention this to out-of-towners who are shocked that we knock down so many historic buildings here... it is a tradition in Detroit. It's just a matter of what replaces it. In the case of the Old Library and St. Aloysius, the landmarks were replaced with equally impressive buildings. In the case of the Statler Hotel and Lafayette Building, we get vacant lots... Matrix indeed

[buildingsofdetroit]

THIS is an example why preservation is important.

[gibran]

I really appreciate your time and efforts to post [[ all of you )...your knowledge is great... I remember as a kid wondering what it was like around the Big D..before the auto industry took off..especially around the Cass where the remaining shells of brownstones remained until the seventies...Also some of the neighborhood off of woodward and the churches and community support buildings...we had some awesome buildings...it is so sad that in Europe it took war to bring down buildings of this period...we couldn't see enough into the future to preserve these classics...

again thanks for the peak into this long gone era... my grand parents who died longtime ago would have remembered these,,,to bad they were both gone when I was about one. I would have loved to pick their brains on what it was like in 1904...

[Hamtragedy]

The Paris of the Midwest. The Paris of Europe, by the way, didn't enact strict preservation laws until 1961. What the War didn't destroy, the populace was eager to modernize. The Beaux-Arts and the Second Empire was old and outdated. Art Nouveau was almost replaced by the Atomic Ranch.

[kathy2trips]

The Paris of the Midwest. The Paris of Europe, by the way, didn't enact strict preservation laws until 1961. What the War didn't destroy, the populace was eager to modernize. The Beaux-Arts and the Second Empire was old and outdated. Art Nouveau was almost replaced by the Atomic Ranch.

Freaking Gorgeous!

Strict preservation laws have payed off for most communities. I priced hardwood floors for my 1970s house and almost passed out. Truly, you can't buy some of the things today that they put in buildings back then. The house I grew up in had floating sliding wood doors! I've never seen anything like that in a house since.

Detroit must have terrible laws; I wish the City could afford to sue the property owners who are letting the treasures we have left to go to seed.

PS: As I recall, Chene once had a lot of that Atomic Ranch/New Frontier architecture, though it was mainly for businesses. Similarly, beaux-arts was most often in municipal buildings, peoples houses at the time period were Victorians.

[Gistok]

As beautiful as that old library was, both inside and outside, I bet it would violate a lot of building and fire codes today. It may have had a lot of shelf space, but only the main floor had reading room space, which really reduced the number of patrons that could use it at any given time.

I doubt I would be able to get to the dizzying heights of the top 2 levels of bookshelves without acrophobia kicking in...

[Blueidone]

Thank for all the great pictures and information everyone!

[Catman]

Those "floors" which the bookshelves were on seems to be just metal plates [[pretty ones though) welded into what amounts to a scaffolding frame. I guess they couldn't have more than one or two people at a time on any of them and that is why you had to request a book from the fenced-up counter. Ya think?

[gnome]

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/i/imag...id=DPA3382.TIF

In this pic you can see that the librarians stood behind a metal screen. I suspect that patrons did not wander through the stacks to pull books, but rather the patrons placed their book request to the librarian and then a gofer retrieved the requested material from the stacks. This might be one of the many reasons why the building was torn down.

In the link below, you can see a couple of gofers in the US patent office in Washington DC. Their attire is pretty casual which marks them as clerks and not lawyers or business people.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/...i,lamb,hec,krb,

[EastsideAl]

"Closed-stack" libraries like this one were the norm for a very long time. But they began to go out of style when the Carnegie money started building "open-stack" libraries all over the place. Part of the Carnegie formula for library building were architectural plans that opened most or all of the book shelves to public browsing. The much larger new open-plan Detroit Main Library was built with a large amount of Carnegie money, as were many branches across the city.

This opening of library stacks to the public rendered obsolete the vertical type of design seen in the old Main [[Centre Park) Library, and commonly seen in many libraries of the time, that generally provided only rudimentary and cramped access to the books designed for use by just a handful of library employees at a time. Most of these older libraries were either replaced by new Carnegie-style buildings, or heavily modified into open-stack libraries.

There are a few important closed-stack libraries remaining though, most notably the Main [[42nd St.) Library in New York City.