Urban Legends of the Los Angeles Central Library
Most talk surrounding the recently remodeled Los Angeles Central Library focuses on the physical beauty of the structure or the library’s impressive 2.5 million volume collection. What is sometimes overlooked is the fascinating urban legends that surround downtown’s classic landmark library.
The Central Library is a historic structure with inventive architecture. The sphinxes, pyramids, snakes, and other decorations have allowed imaginations to soar over the years. We present a few “off-beat” aspects of the library.
The Fruit Crate Label
It is believed that the Central Library is the only library to have appeared on a fruit crate label.
Miss Los Angeles celebrates the city as an agricultural center, and the community’s pride in its new Central Library. The label was used about 1930.
The Library Brand
Charles Lummis, while City Librarian early in the twentieth century, felt the library should have a distinctive method of putting ownership marks on the Library’s more important books. He commissioned a branding iron, patterned after those used in Mexican convent and monastery libraries, known as Marcas del Fuego. Highly prized and important books were then “fire-marked”, with a branding iron. He later employed the same technique for the books at the Southwest Museum. The library no longer has the brand, but you will see it on old books at Central Library, including many in the Rare Books Room.
The Lizard People
Below downtown Los Angeles, in an area starting at Dodger Stadium and ending under the Central Library, lies an ancient city remembered only in old Indian legends, an underground world built by a strange race that vanished five thousand years ago.
In 1934, a mining engineer, W. Warren Shufelt, began searching for this city. He had heard about it in a Hopi legend about the Lizard People. They were a lost race who built thirteen underground cities along the Pacific Coast after a holocaust about 3000 BC. The subterranean settlements held a thousand families each, with food supplies. They bored the tunnels using chemical solutions that melted the bedrock. Among other things, the Lizard People possessed golden tablets that chronicled their race’s history, the origin of humans, and the history of the world since creation. (Quite appropriate for the library setting).
Why is the Library not in Library Tower?
The tallest building west of the Mississippi, at 633 West Fifth Street, directly across Fifth Street from the Central Library, was originally named Library Tower by the developers, Maquire Thomas Partners. It was
part of a deal that traded air rights from above the Central Library for money used as part of the redevelopment of the Central Library. These air rights allowed Library Tower and the Gas Company Building (all part of “Library Square”) to exceed the normal height in their zone. After First Interstate Bank became the primary tenant of Library Tower, they renamed the building “First Interstate World Center”. After Wells Fargo Bank acquired First Interstate Bank, Maquire Partners, who own the
building, reverted to calling it Library Tower.
The distinctive building has been commemorated as a dining chair available from CIT Design in Glendale, at a cost of about $2100.
For more information on the Library, check out their web site at http://www.lapl.org/central
