The people on the sidewalk outside the library saw the hurried gathering of fire equipment and then noticed the smoke. The boredom of a false alarm was eclipsed by shock. Michael Leonard, who worked in the library’s public relations department, ran to a nearby photography store and told the cashier he needed every roll of film in stock. Back at the library, he took pictures of the building and the smoke scrolling out of the upper windows, but he couldn’t bring himself to take pictures of the librarians, who were watching the fire in anguish. Some of them were crying. Sylva Manoogian told me she could smell the syrupy odor of microfilm burning. She said that as she stood watching the building burn, a charred page floated down to the sidewalk, and she recalled that it was from a book called God Is Judging You. Norman Pfeiffer, the architect, dreading that the building might be a total loss, turned to Elizabeth Teoman and said, “This was the biggest opportunity of my career and it’s going to burn down.” Several members of the Board of Fire Commissioners arrived after they heard the news of the fire and stood with the bystanders on the sidewalk. The multinational oil company ARCO was headquartered in the skyscraper across the street; when employees saw the commotion, many came downstairs to see if they could help. Lodwrick Cook, the head of ARCO, was a supporter of the effort to save and renovate the old building. As soon as he saw the street jammed with fire trucks, he ordered coffee and food from the Bonaventure Hotel for the firefighters and anyone standing by.
Wyman Jones was not at Central Library that morning. Jones was in charge of all seventy-three libraries in the city as well as Central Library; his title was city librarian of Los Angeles and his office was on the fourth floor of the Goodhue Building. That morning, he was at the Hollywood branch library, speaking at the launch of a new literacy program. Jones had been city librarian since 1970. He was a tall, ornery Missourian, a jazz pianist, a skilled amateur magician, and the kind of person who liked to have two cigarettes going at the same time. He supervised the construction of more than a dozen new libraries at his previous posts. He came to Los Angeles hoping to tear down Central Library and replace it with a more modern structure, but he grudgingly agreed to renovate and expand it instead. He liked to say that California was a mess, and Los Angeles was a mess, and the library was a mess, but that somehow, he would make the best of it. As soon as the event at the branch in Hollywood ended, Jones left to head back to his office at Central Library. On the way to his car, he bought a chili dog from a street vendor to eat while driving downtown. He got behind the wheel of his car, turned on the radio, unwrapped his chili dog, heard the news that the library was on fire, threw the chili dog out the window, and sped downtown.
Police shut down a section of the Harbor Freeway, and Sixth, Fifth, Hope, Flower, and Grand Streets, and traffic knotted up around the city. The crowd in front of the library grew. Television and radio reporters lined up, waiting for any word. Inside, the fire was roaring into its third hour. The air in the building was blistering. Water sprayed on the fire boiled like a kettle put on for tea. The runoff from the hoses pooled in the basement and was already fifty inches deep. It was so hot in the building that firefighters couldn’t bear it for long; they took breaks every few minutes so their core temperature could come back down to normal. Because they were breathing so heavily, their supplementary oxygen bottles, which ordinarily last an hour, were depleted in ten minutes. Steam from the boiling water percolated through the firefighters’ heavy flameproof coats. Their ears and wrists and knees were scorched. Their lungs became crisp with smoke. Over the course of the day, fifty of them suffered burns, smoke inhalation, or respiratory distress so extreme that they were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. One firefighter was removed by helicopter from the roof because he was too ill to go back through the fire to exit. All of the firefighters eventually recovered, but the number of casualties was the highest in a single incident that the city’s Emergency Services Bureau ever handled.
As the day went on, it began to seem like the fire might eat the library alive. The compressed space of the stacks made it more like a ship fire than a building fire—it was suffocating, ferocious, feeding on itself. Chief Manning complained to a reporter, “The architect of this building may have been a great architect, but he didn’t know his fanny from a hot rock when it came to fire protection.” As the reports from firefighters inside the building grew more pessimistic, Manning admitted that it was the most difficult fire the department had ever faced, and it would take “every trick in the book to save this building.” As a statement, it sounded like he was leaving open the possibility that every trick in the book might not be enough. One of Manning’s deputies pulled Elizabeth Teoman aside and told her he didn’t know if they could do anything more because the fire was so intense and the building was so hospitable to it, with the stacks acting as fireplace flues and the books providing so much fuel. He asked her to give him a list of the irreplaceable items in the building, in case that was all they could save. Teoman remembers this as the moment when she realized the fire was real and that it might destroy the entire library. She was so upset that she decided to focus on doing things that were useful, like describing the floor plan to firefighters and telling them what materials she hoped could be preserved.
Chief Manning briefed Wyman Jones, who’d just arrived, and then Manning left for City Hall to give Mayor Tom Bradley a briefing on the fire and to warn him of the possibility that the building could be lost. Bradley had been at a meeting in San Diego that morning, and while he’d flown back as soon as he heard about the fire, he was stuck in traffic near the airport.
By midday, reports of the fire were all over the local news. Patty Evans, an administrator at the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, had worked for almost two years to figure out how to finance the renovation of Central Library. The day of the fire, she was on jury duty, so she didn’t have access to the news. When the court recessed for lunch, she called her office to check in. Her secretary told her to take a deep breath, then explained that the library was on fire. Evans ran back to the jury room and requested a sidebar with the judge, who agreed to let her leave. When she arrived at the library, she decided to circumvent city bureaucracy and gave an interview to the local television reporters, asking city residents to come downtown and volunteer once the fire was extinguished.
People in the rare-book world were paying special attention to the news from the library. Olivia Primanis, a book conservator with an expertise in mold and mildew, lived in Texas but happened to be in Los Angeles that week. When the head of paper conservation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art heard about the fire, she called Primanis and said, “The library is on fire. You need to get there.”
Even though a fire was storming inside, the library didn’t look distressed if you viewed it from the street. The stucco was smooth and undisturbed. The limestone facing of the outer walls was cool as satin. The statuary gazed sightlessly into the middle distance. The windows glanced and glittered in the sunlight. It was quiet. Except for the pale trickle of smoke from the roof, you might not have known anything was amiss. Then, suddenly, with a bright, hard snap, the windows on the west side of the library exploded and the red arms of flame punched outward and upward, slapping at the stone facade. One of the library commissioners watching from the sidewalk burst into tears. The librarians recoiled. One said she felt like she was watching a horror movie. According to librarian Glen Creason, the breeze was filled with “the smell of heartbreak and ashes.”