Los Angeles Public Library is celebrating 100 years of the Central Library, making this the perfect time to spotlight the exceptional librarians who have overseen this remarkable building and everything within: its collections, programs, services, and staff. Over several weeks, we're highlighting the individuals who have served as Director of Central Library.
In Part 1 of this series,...
“A library card is the start of a lifelong adventure.”—Author Lilian Jackson Braun
In a city as a diverse as Los Angeles, there is one thing we almost all have in common—traffic. While stuck at intersections or on freeways, pondering the heritage of our fair city is probably not on the forefront of everyone's minds.
Most visitors to the Central Library’s Maguire Gardens see Jud Fine's “Spine” installation and the unique collection of fountains that grace the gardens, but not everyone notices tucked away in the westernmost corner, nearest Flower Street, a quiet token of the most ambitious possibility, the World Peace B
First, a number of greetings in the language of a few native peoples on this continent:
The doors of wisdom are never shut.—Benjamin Franklin
The classic icon of wisdom, the owl, is found in several places around the original Bertram Goodhue Library building. These owls are not hidden, but they may not be obvious to the casual visitor.
Los Angeles has been a multi-cultural, polyglot city from the earliest times. In 1781, the pobladores, a small group of racially diverse farmers from Sonora, Mexico, arrived near the banks of the Porciuncula River at a place that would later become Los Angeles.
I recently completed an online heraldry class conducted by the University of Strathclyde, and I learned a great deal that will be helpful to me as a genealogy librarian.
Did you know that when Central Library opened in 1926, the entrance at 530 South Hope Street was both the "front door" and mailing address? Patrons entered the gates at Hope Street and walked up a long sloping ramp to a circulation desk at the center of the lower level.
For decades, Los Angeles (and the rest of Southern California) loved to market itself as a place where you could improve your health in the optimal climate of the region. (Pay no attention to the smog.) But much of the health information, good and bad, from the pre-smog era was hard to come by.
“The point of fiction is to give the reader for a few hours the chance to be somebody else, to broaden and deepen his understanding of himself and the strangers among whom he has to pass his days. The best novels do this now as they have always done it. It is a noble thing.”