It had been a strange, sad year, beginning in January, when the Challenger spacecraft exploded, killing its crew of seven astronauts. The week of April 28 buckled under its own share of bad news. An earthquake rocked Central Mexico. Fires broke out in several British prisons, and scores of inmates escaped. The United States and Libya were in a tense standoff. Closer to the library, a bulldozer at a construction site in Carson, California, sheared off a main sewer cap, and raw sewage was gushing into the Los Angeles River.
On April 29, Central Library opened as usual at ten A.M., and within minutes it was humming. About two hundred employees were already in place around the building, from the shipping docks to the circulation desks to the stacks. Glen Creason, a reference librarian who’d worked at Central since 1979, was at his desk in the History Department. Sylva Manoogian, a World Languages librarian, had just gotten a new car, so she parked it with extra care in the library lot before coming in for her shift. Two hundred or so patrons were inside, browsing the shelves or settling in at the reading tables. Four docents herded a large, giggly group of schoolkids on a tour of the building. Elizabeth Teoman, the head librarian at Central, was in her office with Norman Pfeiffer, a New York City architect who’d been hired to renovate and expand the building. Pfeiffer was thrilled about the commission. He loved the Goodhue Building—“The first time I saw it, I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” he told me—and was eager to get to work renovating it and adding a large new wing. The construction plan was the result of almost twenty years of debate about what to do with Central Library, which was over sixty years old, dilapidated, and too small for the city’s needs. Pfeiffer’s drawings were spread on Teoman’s desk. He draped his suit jacket, with his hotel and rental car keys in the pocket, on a chair at the back of the room.
At the time, the library’s fire prevention consisted of smoke detectors and handheld fire extinguishers. There were no sprinklers. The American Library Association, known informally as the ALA, always advised against sprinklers, because water damage was even worse for books than fire damage. In 1986, however, the ALA reversed its position and began advising libraries to install sprinklers. That morning, in fact, down the hall from Elizabeth Teoman’s office, a colleague of Pfeiffer’s, Steven Johnson, was meeting with the fire department to discuss how the sprinklers could be placed inconspicuously in the library’s historic rooms. The library was built before the development of fire-resistant doors, which are now standard in all large buildings because they halt the spread of fire from one section of the building to another. Fire doors are so effective that new buildings all have them, and older buildings are usually retrofitted with them; they are required by law in most states. Funds for putting them in the library had been in the city budget for more than five years, but somehow, they kept getting overlooked; finally, that day, workers were getting around to installing them.
For years, the library had been written up repeatedly for multiple fire code violations. At this particular moment, there were twenty violations waiting to be resolved. Most were “operational,” including blocked exits, exposed lightbulbs, frayed electrical cords, and the missing fire doors, rather than structural problems with the building. New violations were brought to the fire department’s attention all the time. A number of architectural preservationists suspected that someone was exaggerating the violations to bolster the argument for demolishing the building and replacing it. Even if they were slightly overstated, the building’s problems were real. Twenty years earlier, in 1967, a fire department report had concluded that the probability of a major fire at the library was “very high.” A few years later, the Los Angeles Times called the library “part temple, part cathedral, and part fire hazard.” When Elizabeth Teoman was in library school, she wrote a paper outlining the building’s problems, saying the library was seriously overcrowded but that the large number of fire and safety hazards was even more troubling. She got an A on the paper.
Things are always coming in and going out of a library, so it’s impossible to know what it contains on any given day. By 1986, Central Library’s contents were valued, for insurance purposes, at roughly $69 million. That included at least two million books, manuscripts, maps, magazines, newspapers, atlases, and musical scores; four thousand documentary films; census records dating back to 1790; theater programs of every play produced in Los Angeles since 1880; and telephone directories for every single American city with a population over ten thousand. It had America’s finest assemblage of books on the subject of rubber, donated in 1935 by Mr. Harry Pearson, a noted rubber authority. It had a Shakespeare folio; a quarter million photographs of Los Angeles dating back to 1850; car repair manuals for every single make and model of automobile starting with the Model T; five hundred folk dolls from around the world; the only comprehensive patent collection in the western United States; and twenty-one thousand books about sports. It housed the largest collection of books on food and cooking in the country—twelve thousand volumes, which included three hundred on French cuisine, thirty on cooking with oranges and lemons, and six guides to cooking with insects, including the classic Butterflies in My Stomach.
A few minutes before eleven A.M. on April 29, a smoke detector in the library set off an alarm. The library telephone operator called the fire department dispatcher, saying, “Bells ringing at Central Library.” Security guards spread out through the building, instructing patrons to leave. No one was particularly panicked. The library’s fire alarm went off all the time, for all sorts of reasons—a cigarette tossed in a wastebasket, the occasional crackpot bomb threat, and, most often, for no reason at all except that it was an old, crotchety alarm system prone to spasms of hyperactivity. For the staff and regular patrons, the fire alarm had come to possess all the shock value of a clown horn. Packing up and leaving the building was so tiresome that some librarians were tempted to hide out in their workrooms and wait for the all-clear. Most of them left their personal belongings behind when they went out for the alarms, assuming they’d be right back.
When the alarm went off, Norman Pfeiffer began gathering his drawings and his jacket, but Teoman told him not to bother, since she was sure the interruption would be momentary. Some regular patrons also didn’t bother to pack up when they cleared the building. That morning, a real estate broker named Mary Ludwig was in the History Department doing genealogy research. She’d just discovered she was related to a man in Vermont named Hog Howard when the alarm went off. Rather than disturb all her materials, she left them on the reading table, along with a briefcase containing two years’ worth of research notes, and headed to the exit.
Patrons and staff headed out of the building with a minimum of jostling and rushing. The only person to report a disturbance was an elderly woman who told investigators that a young man with blond hair and a wisp of a mustache had bumped into her as he hurried by. She said he seemed agitated, but he stopped to help her get back on her feet before he dashed out the door.
The building emptied out in just eight minutes, and patrons and staff, a total of about four hundred people, clustered on the sidewalk outside. The sun was inching up in the sky and the pavement was warming. A few librarians used the occasion to light up a Chesterfield, the cigarette of choice among the staff. Sylva Manoogian decided to bide her time in the parking lot so she could keep an eye on her new car. Helene Mochedlover, a Literature librarian who is so devoted to the library that she likes to say she was left on the library doorstep as an infant, chatted with Manoogian and admired her car. Everyone watched with only mild interest as a fire truck rolled up and its crew entered the building on the Fifth Street side. The fire department’s visits to Central Library were as fleeting as they were frequent. Usually, firefighters could take a look around and reset the alarm in a few minutes. Engine Company 10—EC10, in fire department parlance—did the initial check, and one of the firefighters radioed to the incident chief that there was “nothing showing”; in other words, it was a false alarm. One of the firefighters went to the basement to clear the alarm system, but it refused to reset—it persisted in indicating that it detected smoke. The firefighter assumed the system was malfunctioning, but just to be sure, the crew decided to take another look around.