The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Blackstone Library’s $4.8M renovation set
Blackstone Library’s $4.8 million renovation to begin in spring
James Blackstone Memorial Library, a grand building modeled after a Greek temple, is 121 years old this year.
BRANFORD » The James Blackstone Memorial Library, a grand building modeled after an ancient Greek temple, with towering pillars outside and inside, is 121 years old this year; it was dedicated in 1896. And now, for the second time in those many years, renovations are planned.
The last renovations were finished in 1996. This latest round will cost $4.8 million, according to estimates earlier this year.
The reconstruction will be inside and outside — the first time anything has been added to the outside walls of the library. The interior has seen various changes and even subtractions. At one time the upper floor housed a museum, where there were case after case of stuffed birds. They are now in a museum in Westport.
In the current redesign, the interior changes will largely be a reconfiguration of spaces — for example, moving children’s rooms from the top floor to the basement floor, and creating a separate space for teenagers, also on the basement floor.
On the exterior, a new entrance and lobby will be built at the northwest corner of the building — not visible from the front of the building, and hidden from Cedar Street by a berm. This new entrance will include a terrace where people can sit (and read). And it’s just possible that the entryway will be built with the same white Tennessee marble as the rest of the building — the quarry where the more-than-century-old marble came from is still a working quarry.
Tampering with a temple is tricky business, but the motivations for the change are in line with what town leaders envisioned for a library in 1896. The town then had a population of 5,000 with a sizeable number of immigrants who had begun arriving in the 1860s, many from Ireland and Sweden, fleeing famine. Gradually, more immigrants arrived — East Europeans and then Italians in the 1890s and 1900s. So there was a mix of long-time settlers and
new arrivals speaking a babel of languages ... and you do wonder what on earth made a library modeled after a Greek temple seem like a good fit.
However, speeches by learned men at the 1896 dedication services are printed in “Exercises at the Opening of the James Blackstone Memorial Library” and they provide a glimpse of the thinking of town leaders in 1896. Arthur T. Hadley, a Yale professor, said in his speech that the library should be a place of education, but added that “we have come to see that it is essential for the public welfare that people should learn to play as well as work.”
And then he enumerated what the library would do: it was going to help men vote intelligently (women didn’t have the vote then); it would provide enjoyment through books (there were 5,000 books catalogued when the library opened, matching the population); it would give people alternatives to a life of “continuous drudgery on the one hand to riotous amusement on the other.”
Today’s library leaders don’t seem to worry so much about residents being tempted by riotous amusement. But the founders’ ideas that the library should provide education along with enjoyment haven’t really changed much — even though the people of 1896 never could have imagined that a computer lab would be a high priority. It is. Up-to-date technology and more room for more computers are part of the current plans. And more spaces for meeting or special events could help ease the demand for such spaces — and add to the enjoyment factor.
Looking back at the history of Blackstone, Andy McKirdy, president of the board of trustees, says the library is “an extraordinary architectural icon ... and part of the wave of library building at that moment in time “when Andrew Carnegie was endowing libraries nationwide. McKirdy sees the library as “a symbol of aspirations.”
Karen Jensen, library director, adds, “A lot of people don’t have the opportunity to see a building like this. It’s a symbol of what you can achieve — that you could study architecture or art and create something like this.” Indeed, the resplendent murals on the domed ceiling of the rotunda, painted by Oliver Dennett Grover of Chicago is a marriage of art and architecture. There are other grand elements as well, such as the bronze doors, adorned with a pictorial allegory in bas-relief.
The library was the gift of Timothy B. Blackstone, a Branford native, who went west to Chicago to become a rich railroad president who never forgot his roots. When he was approached about helping to finance a library in his home town, Blackstone jumped in to propose a library he would finance in honor of his father, a farmer and town leader. “Exercises at the Opening” says this in the introduction: “Just what the building has cost we have not been permitted to know, but it is safe to say that with the generous endowment for the maintenance and increase of the library the whole gift cannot fall much short of half a million dollars.”
Very big money in those days.
Which allowed the prominent Chicago architect, Solon Spencer Beman, to design a building of white Tennessee marble, inspired by the Erechtheum. That temple, a sister temple to the Parthenon on the Athens Acropolis, was built to house a wooden statue of Athena, god of wisdom, and it is famous, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “largely for its complexity and for the exquisite perfection of its details.” The pillars on the Erechtheum have Ionic capitals — as do the four pillars at the front of the Blackstone Library and on the pillars inside.
The architecture alone makes the Blackstone Library a wonderful and unusual and awe-inspiring free library. But Jensen cites other rare qualities: “I don’t know,” she said, “of too many libraries that have such a collection of specimen trees on their grounds.” Among them on sloping green lawns are : crab apple, weeping eastern redbud, fastigiate European beech, Kousa dogwood.
Jensen added, “We also have the complete works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (died in Short Beach, 1919), and a portrait which hangs in the reference room.” Wilcox, a poet, is revered in the Short Beach section of Branford, even though not so much by literary critics.
The Blackstone Memorial Library is like a treasure chest, full of wonders. And sometime next year, probably in the springtime, work will begin on the newest incarnation of a Connecticut library that looks like a Greek temple.