"Well, I've always seen these photos of the Old Main library on Vine Street, and I wondered what happened to it, because it's an immaculate building and the inside was incredibly beautiful," he says. One of the pictures he's talking about shows tall pillars reaching up to the ceiling over several stories of shelving with elaborate carvings on the ends. There are low railings, and books — lots and lots and lots of books. It looks almost magical. If you added floating candles and a couple of owls, it could be straight out of a Harry Potter movie.
The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County's current main library at Vine and 8th and 9th streets is not the first incarnation of the hallowed establishment. It's the third. The first was located on the second floor of the Ohio Mechanics Institute, at 6th and Vine, where the former Terrace Plaza Hotel now stands. "But when people think of Old Main, they generally think of 629 Vine Street; built as an opera house — never was an opera house — and that was the main library," says Christopher Smith.
Smith is a reference librarian in genealogy and local history. He says without a doubt, Old Main was a beautiful place. But it wasn't very practical. Truman Handy's Opera House company went bankrupt in 1868 before the building was finished, and it was sold to the fledging library. "And that's why we ended up with those beautiful wrought iron levels," Smith says. "Because those were originally meant to be balconies for a theater. So basically you rip those out and create areas where you can create shelves and shelving, and stacks — stacks as we call it at the library."
Another historian says that's not quite accurate. John Fleischman, who wrote a history of the library, Free & Public, says Handy never finished the stage area of his would-be opera house. "The famous cast-iron reading room ... was a totally novel design, an innovation in 1870 for what we would now call 'information storage and retrieval,' " he told WVXU. "It was nominally the work of local architect James McLaughlin but the real genius behind it was William Frederick Poole who was lured to Cincinnati from Boston." Fleischman wrote in after this story was originally published and says Poole "laid out the legendary cast-iron 'alcove' library that stunned America when it was finally finished in 1873."
(Fleischman says Poole, who was librarian from 1869 to 1873, was responsible for a number of other changes that are taken for granted today: he put women in charge of "nearly all professional operations," added novels to the offerings, and kept the library open seven days a week.)
The library started moving in in Dec. 1870, but the work wasn't completely finished until 1874. "The interior, like I said, it looks fabulous, unless you have to work there," Smith says. Tom Moorman started working for the Cincinnati Public Library in 1965, and retired 35 years later. He knew a lot of people who worked in Old Main, and says they were happy to leave. "If you look at the front of the building, those were the only windows that building had. There were no windows on the side, and in the back, that was a storage area, and they usually didn't open the windows in the front. And Cincinnati was just as hot and humid then as it is now."
It had no air conditioning, so, Old Main was hot in the summer. "And it was heated by coal furnaces," Moorman says. "And the building was dirty. There's no two ways about it. Actually there were several positions of book cleaners." Moorman says some people were hired specifically to clean the stacks and the books. "If I had some of those books here, the tops are frequently almost black from the soot. And many of them that were stored in the sub-cellar are very warped because they got flooded so often," Moorman says. "That's no fun either. As you well know, your basement, you get water in there and it sits for any length of time, it doesn't smell good."
Moorman says before Old Main was electrified, it was lit by gaslight, which is not easy to read by. And even after electric lights came on, he says the building was still rather dark. And it was dangerous. The public wasn't allowed up in the stacks. Instead, pages would pull books and re-shelve them. At least two pages died, according to Fleischman's book Free & Public, and researched in part by Moorman. In 1875, 15-year-old Willie Haldecamp took the elevator to the third floor with books and fell. In 1902, book shelver John Sloan fell down the elevator shaft.
Old Main was torn down in 1955 after the current Main Library was built. Moorman says he never heard any charming stories from those who worked in Old Main. "To their point of view, they were leaving behind the 19th century," he says. Besides the working conditions, Christopher Smith has a theory on why the building wasn't saved. "Because that's just what we did in the '50s. There was no thought of retrofitting, remodeling, you just assumed it was going to be razed."
Once renowned as “the most magnificent public library in the country,” the Old Cincinnati Library was destroyed in 1955, seemingly without a second thought. Originally intended to be an Opera House, construction began, but Truman Handy’s Opera House Company went bankrupt in 1868. The building was then sold to the library. Although the construction wasn’t completed until 1874, the library officially opened its doors in 1870.
Located at 629 Vine Street, the Old Cincinnati Library soon became known for its impressive interior, housing around 60,000 books with the capacity for 300,000. The total cost of the lot and the construction amounted to $383,594.53, an equivalent to a whopping $7.7 million today. Local architect James Mclaughlin primarily designed the building, but it was said that the true mastermind behind its design was William Frederick Poole, a librarian from Boston who ran the library from 1869 to 1873. Poole kept the library open seven days a week, added novels to the collection, and primarily appointed women for “nearly all professional operations.”
Featuring enormous pillars, five levels of cast iron shelving with intricate carvings, marble floors, and an atrium boasting a skylight ceiling, the library has often been compared to fantastical scenes from Harry Potter. The main entrance displayed the busts of William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Benjamin Franklin.
While the Cincinnati Library, often referred to as “Old Main” may have looked magnificent, it was not practical. In the summer, the library became stiflingly hot due to the lack of windows. The lack of windows also made it difficult to read, even after electric lights were installed. And in the winter, the coal furnaces covered the outside of the books with black soot. The library even had to hire “book cleaners”, employees responsible for cleaning the soot from the books and stacks.
Old Main had also become overrun with books, which eventually exceeded the capacity of 300,000. While some books were kept in the basement, it was prone to flooding, thus warping the volumes. Moreover, the public was not allowed in the stacks. Instead, pages had to pull books from the shelves as it was simply too dangerous for the patrons.
According to the book Free & Public, at least two of Old Main’s pages passed away. In 1875, Willie Haldecamp, books in hand, took the elevator to the third floor and fell. Then, in 1902, John Sloan fell down the elevator shaft. Due to the unsafe conditions and infrastructure issues, a new building was constructed. In 1955, the library was moved just down the road to a more contemporary building at 800 Vine Street. The magnificent former library was then demolished, and now a parking garage stands in its place. The three busts of prominent figures were removed from the main entrance of the former library, and placed in the garden of the new location as an ode to Old Main.
Forty-three years ago the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton county burst its buttons. The building, erected in 1872, reached its planned capacity of 300,000 books in 1894, and the Board of Trustees began a campaign for a new building. The public library now has over 1,000,000 books, and the people of both city and county are inconvenienced by the terrific congestion.
Users of the Cincinnati Public Library know some of the things that have happened since 1894. They are aware of the very bad lighting, the poor ventilation which causes the old building to reek with smells, the lack of seat for readers and research workers, and the retarded service. They have seen that, when people are taken suddenly ill in the Public Library, there is no place to place them except on the floor, where they wait for the ambulance.
What the public cannot see is the method of accommodating 1,000,000 books. Books are crowded three deep on the shelves; they are stored in the basement and in the damp sub-basement, where the air is so foul that no library attendant is permitted to work longer than twenty minutes. Some of the less frequently used books are stored in branches and some are kept in the library attic. Very valuable ones are kept in a back vault. All this means that books cannot be quickly produced, that sometimes there is a delay of two or three days before a patron can receive the books he wants.
This condition also works a hardship on the branches and their readers. The main library is their source of supply, and if the source of supply cannot produce the needed books when they are asked for, the branches are unable to give the public the service to which it is entitled.
The Public Library has an unusually fine and large lantern slide collection. This collection weighs so much that a few years ago, the city building inspectors recommended that it be moved onto the first floor, because the third floor threatened to give under it.
Every available inch of space goes to the housing of books, so the working conditions of the staff are no better than the conditions that conditions that confront the reading public. The staff suffers from inadequate lighting, antiquated ventilation and faulty plumbing.
Third and fourth couldn't stand weight of books
If a fire broke out, it would be almost impossible to control it, or to save books, records or lives.
There could be 1000 people in the building when the fire broke out (150 staff + 8000 visitors a day in the winter)
Cincinnati's public library has been popping up online in BuzzFeed lists such as "The 30 Best Places to Be If You Love Books." It isn't the modernist brick-and-glass main branch of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County at 800 Vine St. that is grabbing attention, though. It's the "old" Main, the one that was torn down without a whimper back in 1955.
Today, people are captivated by stunning black-and-white photos of the cast-iron book alcoves and spiral staircases, and bemoan this long-lost gem. The original library building, known as Old Main, stood for 85 years at 629 Vine St., next door to the old Enquirer Building. Once heralded as "the most magnificent public library in the country," according to the library website, in the end Old Main was derided as antiquated and unsuitable for the 1.25 million volumes in the library's collection.
"Free & Public" by John Fleischman traces the public library's beginning to the passage of the Ohio Common Schools Act on March 14, 1853, that included provisions for collecting funds for school libraries. School board president Rufus King built up a central library housed in the Central School on Longworth Street (a street that no longer exists between Race and Vine, north of Fifth). In 1856, Dr. Cornelius G. Comegys on the library committee made a deal to move the library to the second floor of the Ohio Mechanics' Institute at Sixth and Vine.
The Public Library of Cincinnati outgrew the OMI building, so in 1868 the board purchased Truman B. Handy's opera house under construction on Vine Street. It was just a four-story shell when the project had gone bankrupt. The board hired local architect James W. McLaughlin, who would go on to design the Cincinnati Art Museum and Shillito's among other landmarks, to complete the building as a library. New librarian William F. Poole brought his own ideas of a modern library and worked with McLaughlin on the design, to include central heating and an elevator.
The Public Library consisted of three buildings. The front building, the original opera house, was open to the public on Dec. 9, 1870. The middle building and main hall opened to great fanfare on Feb. 25, 1874, with a speech by George Hunt Pendleton, who had been the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1864.
Patrons entered on Vine Street beneath busts of William Shakespeare, John Milton and Benjamin Franklin. A vestibule led to the cathedral-like main hall, four stories tall, topped with a massive skylight roof. The floor was checkerboard marble tile. Five levels of bookshelves jammed the walls. Shafts of sunlight cut through the windows to provide ample illumination.
"The main hall is a splendid work," The Enquirer reported at the opening. "... The hollow square within the columns is lighted by an arched clear roof of prismatic glass set in iron, the light of which is broken and softened by a paneled ceiling of richly-colored glass. ... One is impressed not only with the magnitude and beauty of the interior, but with its adaptation to the purpose it is to serve."
This was all part of Poole's vision for libraries, to appeal not just to scholars but to the public. He added more fiction and even handed out library cards to children. When the library opened, Poole had already left for Chicago. His plans for Cincinnati became a model for public libraries.
The cost of the lot and building was $383,594.53, about $7.7 million today. The Public Library contained 60,000 volumes, with an estimated capacity of 300,000. It became the Main Library in 1906 when Andrew Carnegie's donation added branches.
By the 1920s, there were calls for a new library building. Books were stacked beyond reach. Ventilation was poor, the air stuffy. The paint was peeling. Bond issues in the 1920s and '30s for a new library were defeated, but finally passed in 1944. Post-war inflation and squabbles over location for the site dragged on, but the corner of Eighth and Vine streets won out.
The doors of Old Main closed on Jan. 27, 1955, and the new Main opened four days later. The old building was sold to the Leyman Corp. for $615,000, and was razed by that June. The site is now a parking garage.
The three busts were saved for the new library's garden. The 1982 expansion of the Main Library included an atrium and skylight, perhaps in homage to the main hall. When the end came for Old Main, there were no arguments to save it. No one organized protests. No one wrote letters to the editor. The interest today in the building reflects current tastes and romance with the past. As Fleischman noted in his library history, "Yet when the doors closed forever ... and wise heads declared that Old Main would never be missed, they were wrong."
Cincinnati's Old Main Library was once heralded as "the most magnificent public library in the country." Opened in 1870, the four-story library featured a towering skylit atrium, spiraling staircases, cast-iron alcoves and 1.25 million volumes.
Space issues forced the library to close in 1955 and move to a new location two blocks away. The old site was demolished that year, and today it is occupied by an office building and parking garage.
Harper's Weekly, March 21, 1874. Harper’s Weekly reported on the opening of the Main Hall of the new Library at 629 Vine Street: “The first impression made upon the mind on entering this hall is the immense capacity for storing books in its five tiers of alcoves, and then the eye is attracted and gratified by its graceful and carefully studied architecture, which provides that no portion of the shelving is deprived of a proper amount of light…” The Main Library would serve the community until it was demolished after the construction of the current Main Library in 1955.
Reviewing Lantern Slides at Old Main. The file cabinets in the background housed the Library’s massive collection. In 1904, the Public Library started a new series of travel lectures featuring the burgeoning Lantern Slide collection. The talks proved popular and, by 1907, the East End Branch as well as the North Cincinnati Branch had lecture rooms of their own for slide viewing. Additionally, the slides were loaned to various borrowers for their own lectures. By 1928, the Library owned over 45,000 slides illustrating travel, science, architecture, art and local interest topics, all of which were in great demand from lecture clubs around the city. By 1940 however, the slides started to decline in popularity and were eventually superseded by the lighter and more robust 35mm slide. 1907 Annual Report.
The Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library can trace its roots back to the Ohio Mechanics Institute. Located at 6th and Vine Streets, the Mechanics Institute was one of the nation's first technical schools, and served the city's growing population of skilled tradesmen. In 1853 the state legislature passed the Ohio Common Schools Act, which laid the groundwork for the establishment of a public library. A clause in the bill stated that "every family in each district shall be entitled to the use of one volume at a time from the school library". Rufus King II, president of the Board of Education, turned the Institute's second-floor reading room into a public library, and through his tireless efforts, tax money was secured, and a librarian was hired.
The Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library has occupied a prominent position in downtown Cincinnati since 1874, when the Main Library was opened at 629 Vine Street. Considered the most magnificent public library building in the country at the time, “Old Main” featured one element similar to today’s library: a towering atrium with a skylight ceiling. The building closed in 1955, when the “New Main Library,” located at 800 Vine Street, opened.
In 1868, the Library Board examined Truman Handy's unfinished Opera House on Vine Street as a potential location for the Public Library. The Board bought the land and nearly finished front building for $83,000, and local architect James McLaughlin was hired to finish the four-story building facing Vine Street. In December 1870, the Public Library moved into the smaller front building, and the larger Main Hall was completed in February 1874.
The March 21, 1874 issue of Harper’s Weekly reported on the opening of the Main Hall of the new Library at 629 Vine Street: “The first impression made upon the mind on entering this hall is the immense capacity for storing books in its five tiers of alcoves, and then the eye is attracted and gratified by its graceful and carefully studied architecture, which provides that no portion of the shelving is deprived of a proper amount of light…”
The Main Library would serve the community until it was demolished after the construction of the current Main Library in 1955.
"The art rooms , situated on the third floor, are among the most interesting and instructive in the library. Its original one room has grown to four; they are large, light, airy, and offer every facility for the advantageous use of the books. Here are collected thousands of volumes, rare, choice, and valuable, published in England, France, Germany, Italy, and America. Every epoch of history, and each branch of science and art is represented." Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of The Public Library of Cincinnati, Ohio, 1899 .
Librarian Albert Whelpley..."listened to the heavily female staff, especially to Miss Laura Smith. She came to Cincinnati in 1898 from Melvil Dewey's New York State Library School and told him the Library needed a more professional staff. She set up an in-house library school, hereafter known as the Training Class, in the fourth-floor attic. Women who survived the Training Class virtually ran the Cincinnati Public Library for the next sixty years." Free & Public: One Hundred and Fifty Years at the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County , by John Fleischman.
"In 1955, the Main collection had about 1.5 million items, nearly all of them on paper. It took librarian Jacob Epstein's teams a week to pack up. Preparations began in December 1954 with shelvers in Old Main measuring off the books in thirty-inch lengths, each section to be transferred to a thirty-inch-long carton, each to be given a color-coded label that corresponded to a specific shelf location in New Main." Free & Public: One Hundred and Fifty Years at the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County , by John Fleischman.
