![]() ![]() 53rd St., library employees gave classes on bookkeeping and financial literacy. “Essentially there was a carrell of paperbacks, and one or two shelves.”Īt the Hyde Park Bank, 1525 E. “To the best of my understanding, people just walked by,” Grinnell said. “How did people know what books were available?” someone asked. Max Grinnell, leading a tour through Nichols Park, which runs between 53rd and 55th streets and was built in the 1950s because “a group of concerned patrons of the Blackstone branch library were really intent on having more greenspace” on land cleared for urban renewal. How-to and self-help books were very popular.” There were people picking up popular books of the time. “In the teens and the 20s, where the patrons were able to check out books in the two newsstands, they usually averaged about 1,500 to 2,000 a month. Kenwood and Hyde Park are Chicago’s most bookish neighborhoods, so there was always demand. Grinnell led his dozen or so library buffs down to the corner of Lake Park and 50th, once the site of a newsstand that doubled as a lending library. The library distributed books throughout the community. Oliver Dennett Grover, whose work had been displayed at the Columbian Exposition, painted the murals.īlackstone, however, was not merely a pompous, insular cultural symbol. He wanted to get some of the people who’d been involved with the World’s Columbian Exposition, including Solon Spencer Beman, who was the architect of this building.”īeman, who also designed the Pullman community and the Fine Art Building, modeled the library after the Erechtheion, a temple on the Acropolis in Athens. “One of the things that he mentioned was he did want it to have a grand sense of presence. “Blackstone was not specifically a bookish fellow or had his own private library, but he had seen what was going on with Andrew Carnegie’s library programs, so he was very excited about creating a library for the community,” Grinnell said. The bookshelves are bronzed, with a lamp at the head of each row. Since the money came from his private fortune, rather than the public treasury, he could gild it as much as he wanted. Perhaps Blackstone was motivated by competitiveness with a fellow industrialist, or by civic boosterism, but he believed a building that housed the art of literature should be a work of art in itself. Carnegie never shared his wealth with Chicago, but we had our own library-building millionaire: Timothy Beach Blackstone, president of the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Treasure Island still amazes me.”Īndrew Carnegie, the robber baron and philanthropist, built 106 libraries in Illinois in the early 20th Century. We didn’t have a lot of money to travel, but I traveled through those books. She’d bring back discarded gazetteers and atlases. “I remember my mom bringing home a pile of National Geographics. An urban studies lecturer at the University of Chicago, Grinnell is the son of a librarian, which has given him a lifelong love of books and the buildings where they can be found. Grinnell was about to explain why Blackstone is a classic piece of architecture and every other public library is just good enough for government work, as a docent on a Sunday afternoon tour of Blackstone and its surrounding neighborhood. Oliver Dennett Grover, whose work had been displayed at the Columbian Exposition, painted the murals. The dome in the library rotunda features murals representing Art, Science, Literature and Labor. Edgewater, built in a style Grinnell calls “Faux Lloyd Wright,” could be a suburban village hall. Chicago Lawn, built in 1960, looks like a highway rest stop. Every other neighborhood library fits some category of functional public architecture: the venerable Kelly, in Englewood, looks like a police station. Blackstone is the only branch that matches the classical grandeur of the original Central Library, now the Cultural Center. In the entire Chicago Public Library system, there is no place like Blackstone, the city’s oldest branch, built in the gilded age year of 1904. A pair of Ionic columns marked the entrance to the reading room. The bookshelves were bronzed, with a lamp at the head of each row. Beneath Grinnell’s feet was a tiled pattern, radiating from a red target. The paintings were populated by characters in classical Grecian garb. Above his head, decorating the dome, were murals representing Art, Science, Literature and Labor. Max Grinnell, a jolly-bellied man with flowing hair and a “Chicago” shamrock t-shirt, stood in the rotunda of the Blackstone Branch of the Chicago Public Library, 4904 S.
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