Rock Island's library was a palace for information
The handsome building planned for the corner of 19th Street and 4th Avenue in downtown Rock Island was the culmination of a long-time dream, the Davenport Times reported more than a century ago.
The structure was the city’s new public library.
With its dramatic entrance framed by Ionic columns, as shown in the drawing published in the newspaper, the edifice was a far cry from the library’s previous location at the rear of the second floor of the Mitchell & Lynde block. There, the newspaper reported, 15,000 volumes “are crowded into a floor space that would hardly be a credit for a library of half the size or one fourth the importance.”
“For years, it has been the dream of the city, and those who have that intellectual department of the city’s interests so much at heart, that some day there would be a stately building with all the magnificent appointments of the modern structures to which attention could be directed with the proud knowledge that here was an exclusive library building. And now that dream is fast approaching realization,” the Times reported on Feb. 16, 1901.
With its reopening this week after a $153,000 interior renovation, let’s check out Illinois’ oldest public library when its design was first presented to the public.
The Rock Island Public Library, which opened in 1903, was planned at a time when the community was enjoying a renaissance in public library construction. Across the Mississippi River in Iowa, the city of Davenport was awaiting its $50,000 public library made possible by a donation from Eastern industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
Rock Island’s $70,000, public library was financed largely through the generosity of lumber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser, a German immigrant who got his start in Rock Island.
The library’s site at the southeast corner of 19th Street and 4th Avenue was considered a prime location.
“Here on a corner lot where has stood one of the old landmarks — the old Boggess property — of the city, will the art of the builder raise a monument of stone and brick that would be an ornament to a city twice the size of Rock Island.”
The Times noted that the city did not have to go outside of the community “to find the talent to lay out the plans of this new edifice.” The local architectural firm Drack & Kerns won a design competition for the work. “And it was not pure luck, either. No more discriminating inspection of specifications could have been made, and the honor that thus came to this firm of architects rarely falls to men so young,” the Times reported.
Their design called for a structure of the classic style, complete with a “skylight which will let a flood of light into the rotunda.”
Other features were to include “a handsome broad entrance at once the pride of the whole town, reached over a flight of stone steps guarded at either side by stone checks surmounted by bronze electroliers.” A frieze ringing the top of the building inscribed with the names of literary giants — Shakespeare, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Hugo, Longfellow and Tegner.
Plans called for three stack rooms with a capacity for 75,000 volumes. On the second floor were an assembly room and board of directors office.
“Every effort has been made to make the new building complete in all respects, and there will without doubt be few library buildings in the country that will be better equipped for the rapid and accurate transaction of business,” the Times reported.
John Willard can be contacted at (563) 383-2314 or jwillard@qctimes.com.