I come not to praise the new library, but dig up the buried ones. There were two. The Romanesque castle above was built in 1889, designed by Long and Kees. (It almost foreshadows the City Hall they did later, just as the Southwest Library by Ralph Rapson nods towards his much larger Raring Center.)

It’s a style I admire more than I enjoy, but I wish I’d had the chance to visit. It was demolished in 1961, when popular appreciation for the stony old structures was at an absolute nadir. Why, you couldn’t cross the New Frontier with these old stone beasts dragging behind. You needed something modern! Clean! Efficient! Rational!

And so they designed something . . .