American Alexandria: Susan Orlean on the Great LA Library Fire

each project. If that weren't enough, her book The Orchid Thief inspired adaptation one of the more successful art house movies of the past twenty years. Her most recent book takes as its heroes the librarians and archivists of Los Angeles County. Her entree to this story was her shock upon hearing for the first time just three years ago

about the six arson at l A's Central Library. The fire is mostly unknown outside southern California, overshadowed by the Chernobyl event, but it's our Alexandria, the most devastating library fire in American history. So we have four hundred thousand gone, just gone. The whole collections. The l A Library had the largest cookbook collection in the US. They're out of print. They're gone. I mean, they had car manuals for every make and model of cars, starting at the model t irrecoverable.

It had been developed. Librarians developed these collections over the years, finding these books, putting them together. So each library is also unique in that way. What's in the New York Public Library is not the same as what's in the l A Public Library, but the core stuff. And while you can quantify it, you can say four hundred thousand books. The library was founded at the turn of the century. Many of these collections had been built from that time,

and that can't be fixed by money. And it's like Fantasia. It's an incredibly beautiful building that is a sort of combination Art Deco Egyptian downtown, right in the center of downtown. And this was the central library of the entire l A Library system in it was in bad shape. It was a time when downtown l A was in bad shape. People weren't even sure that it was important to have a library. Downtown Los Angeles has changed. It's unrecognizable from

when I first came here. No one lived inland that what Nola Wood lived in Silver Lake in Los VELAs. The air quality was so poor that everybody lived as far west as they could afford, and nobody lived downtown. Describe what happened um April. A fire alarm went off and everybody thought it was a false alarm. The library had a lot of false alarms, and lo and behold, firefighters found smoke in the fiction section. Suddenly it absolutely erupted. I mean, you can imagine a fire in the library,

that's the perfect environment. More than that, it wasn't only that it was books. It was in the stacks, which are almost like chimneys. They were thick, concrete walled tubes filled with books. Biggest library fire in the history of the US, which at the time I heard about it, which was very recently, I am shocked. You would assume there would be coverage in the New York papers. So I went back to look at what was going on

that somehow obscure. You're this news. There's a little story on the front page in the New York Times saying radiation detected in Scandinavia was the Chernobyl meltdown, and I had kind of forgotten how terrifying that had been. Nobody knew what was going to happen, and it really was days of the New York Times being wall to wall Chernobyl coverage because we none of us knew if this fallout was going to end up traveling around the world.

In fact it did, but the Chernobyl I don't want to digress on this, but I had lived in Los Angeles pretty much full time, the only time of my life that I lived only in l A. And in December eighty five and moved back to New York. So you just missed and well, I and I commuted back and forth forever, but I was mostly in New York and Chernobyl was six and I was living in New York at the time, and remember that never heard a word about this fire. Yeah, so how do you first

become familiar? How did this cross your desks? I had just moved to l A. And I was offered a tour of Central Library by the head of the Library Foundation because I had done a little fundraising thing for them, and I thought, well, I've never actually been to Central Library in l A. And libraries had really come back into my consciousness when I had a kid and started taking my son to the library and was reminded so powerfully of what it is like as a child to

go to a library. And it was really vivid and very poignant for me because my mom had just developed Alzheimer's and I was thinking a lot about our trips together to the library, so libraries were on my mind. When I was offered this tour of Central Library, I thought, oh great, so I went down there was really struck

by the building because it's so beautiful. And as we were walking through on this tour, Ken Brecker, who is the head of the foundation, pulled a library book off the shelf and he took a deep whiff of it and I thought, I guess I'm new to l a. Maybe that's the way people do it here. What do I know books? Actually, it's a nice thought. And he said, you can still smell the smoke and some of them. And I said, oh, did they used to allow smoking in the library And he looked at me like I

was crazy. Of course, he said no, the fire And I said what fire And he said the big fire, the fire in six that shut the library down for seven years. And my jaw just dropped and I said, what tell me about this? And how did I never hear about it? Because the more I learned, more I learned the scope of the fire, the more amazed I was. That was one of those stories that was kind of

hiding in plain sight. So my interest in writing about libraries then had this hook because besides just being a chance to write about my feelings about libraries, it was a chance to write about this event that was fascinating.

I mean both the investigation into it, the reason that I didn't know about it, the libraries recovery from it, and all of the emotions around it, which we're really powerful because obviously people in l A knew about this, and for seven years that library was closed, the main library, the library still around. He just passed away. We spent many,

many many hours on the phone. He's he was an amazing care during His name was Wyman Jones and he's irascible, um, arrogant, fascinating, multi talented guy who was an amateur magician, very talented magician and jazz pianist who's also this head of libraries. He had come from running the libraries in Fort Worth, Texas and was the head of the library system in

l A for twenty years. Very opinionated. He actually believed that central Library should be torn down and that the land should be sold and there should be a new library built somewhere else. But he conceded the point when public opinion rose up to preserve the building. So why if back then, when the fire happened and it was closed for seven years in that area isn't favorites, why

did they bother resurrecting the library. Well, there were a lot of people who made the argument that there was no need for a central downtown library and that the city could function very well just having branch library. And those people who wanted to resurrect it, how did they win the day. I can't say that people had the ability to see twenty years into the future and realized downtown would be renovated um the way it's been, because I was downtown in that period of time here as

a visitor and no one lived down here. It was desolate at night. So the idea that the library would be a centerpiece in a revitalized downtown sounded ridiculous. But these people really had the hope that downtown would turn into a thriving part of the city. But there were also people saying the building is too small, we should tear it down, sell the land, will get all sorts of money for the land, and we'll build another central library somewhere else. Yeah, and that there was a very

strong um kind of movements supporting that. Now, looking back, I would say, we're really lucky that that didn't happen. Is there a hero of the preservation cause absolutely there was a woman named Margaret Bach and another architect named Barton Phelps. A number of architects got together and said

we have to preserve the library. And that actually was the first organized group doing any kind of historical preservation in l A. So we have them to thank that that grew into being the l A Conservancy, which has preserved all these Loutner houses, all these Schindler houses that wouldn't have happened if the library hadn't been threatened. Now, described the devastation of losing that volume of these things to them, precious volumes of beautiful books. Who did you

talk to about that? I spend time with a lot of the librarians who many of whom are now retired, who were here at the time the librarians were devastated. I mean they had spent their entire professional lives developing the collections in their departments also, and I found this really touching. They were absolutely frantic over the prospect of

the patrons not having the library to come to. And the city of l A hired a psychologist to work with the librarians because a lot of them really were suffering kind of PTSD and they had seen their life's work go up and smoke. They care. They care about books in a way that you probably you do on the park as your this is your stock and trade. But uh, you know similar, I guess to art, where there's an inventory of material that exists purely for a

humanistic reason. People who work there are horrifically underpaid. I was guided recently by a New York Time writer, uh, to the plight of libraries in Iowa, and we were my wife and I have a charitable foundation, my family, and we were pointed towards this group of people. And there's three libraries she's been in touch with who are struggling too. I spoke to I said to one of them, I said, what do you need? I don't want to assume anything. I said, what do you need and how

much money? She said, the budget for the library is five thousand dollars. I said, I said, wait a second. I said, you mean like a day or a week or and she said no, no, She said everybody's volunteers and part time people, and no one's getting paid. And she's books are given to us. She said, books we don't need. She said, what I need in this library, it's food. I need money for food because the kids are coming here and asking for food and they want

to eat. They come from poor homes. And I thought the average person just can't appreciate how much they must have suffered. Yeah. A number of librarians um marriages fell apart in the wake of this. They were really pressed and out of a job, yeah, and felt useless, felt they didn't know what to do with themselves. One woman librarian told me she didn't get her period for for four months after the fire. She was under so much stress and she was so dismayed. I think it's very difficult.

I think it would be the only analog I can think of is if your house burned down. When Dick Cavitt's house, one of the Seven Sisters houses in Montalk, the Stanford White Houses on the bluff there in Montalk. The house burned down. A good deal of what was his on the personal level was destroyed in the fire. The house was ruined, and for that reason, I keep nothing of any value like that in my Long Island home. It's in storage in the city because I'm terrified of

a fire. It's terrifying. And interestingly, the insurance coverage that a library has covers the building and not the contents, so the insurance did not cover the cost of the lost books. It's like two million dollars worth of books. The money had to be raised. It was raised by tiny donations from school kids, big donations from the Getty Foundation, from some of the studios George Lucas, Sydney Sheldon Um. There was a real rallying in the city, and I suspect it was a lot of people who had never

really before given the library much thought. Well, of course, all books now in the world we live in existed digitally. Everything is on a file somewhere and backed up, and there's no fear that that's going to be raised forever. This fire, because it was so epic, did it launch some kind of program where people could preserve these books better and in case this happens and these fabled collections

aren't lost. It's interesting because, um, the fire occurred right at the moment when technology was first entering library management. The l A library at that point switched to an electronic catalog because even losing the card catalog was devastating. Yeah, I mean they had to read catalog two million books they didn't even know. And that was actually one of those odd pieces of timing that electronic cataloging was just becoming widely available. So l A had to read catalog

all of its books. Anyway, it was purchasing all of these new books to replace the ones that were lost, but the books themselves all new books. Digital copy exists, but of old books they Google has a huge project where they are digitally scanning old but they don't exist on a file that that book is it. Yeah, and they're gonna make a file. I mean for an individual

library to do that, it's probably Google. Yeah. And so we are putting more safeguards in place so that if you had a devastating fire and you lost these rare in many cases, now I think there is a backup on the other hand, the l A Public Library has the largest or one of the very largest collections of maps and atlas is of any library in the country. They have over two thousand. It would take a very long time and a lot of money for them to

digitize all of them. That's the goal, because that would be fantastic to have all those maps, a digital copy of all of them. But it's it's an enormous amount of work for a library to do. For me, what I find interesting with a book like this, You don't make it into a detective story. You don't build this book in that way. This book is a lot of history. How does the book begin to emerge? And how do you piece together? I guess what I'm asking is, how does Susan Lean write a book? What do you do?

I'm still trying to answer that question, actually for myself. But what I do I have a My approach is to throw my net as wide as possible in the beginning, to have no preconceived idea of what the book has, show me everything, just I want to learn everything. The way I look at it is in the beginning, I'm a student. I'm I'm doing a graduate course in the library. Library history, the history of this particular incident with the fire,

the people who work there. The people who work there now what the day to day life is of a library, and in the course of it, you know, and the history of arson and the history burning books, in the course of world of events, which sadly has been a theme since the beginning of time. As I'm doing all of this and gathering so much material, themes begin emerging to me. And what this was about was storytelling. We are creatures who tell stories, We preserve stories, and we

make stories up about yourselves. And I feel like this was about the story of the library, and the library is the repository of stories. The people who became very interesting to me in the book, like Harry Peak, the person who is accused of starting the fire, of Charles lammis one of the really fascinating characters who ran the library. These were people who were who made up stories about themselves, who created stories around the who they were in the world,

even more than the average person. So as that theme began to emerge, it helped me organize this material and begin pruning away at what was important for me to know but wasn't important to put in the book. I chose to start the book with Harry Peak because I think people are more interested in people than they are in places or events that a book that invites you in through a character is often one that you're willing

to keep reading. And he as a person who was a compulsive storyteller otherwise known as a liar, he symbolized so much of what the book was. He's a kind of classic creature of l A, a want to be actor, dreamer, a drifter, how old at the time of the event he is in his to Ennis, And he also kind of intersected with l A history in a very interesting way. Um, and I won't necessarily tell you the de nument of his story, so that will leave a little bit of mystery.

But even the way he left this earth was very much a part of what was going on historically in Los Angeles. Yeah, but my challenges. I like writing about things I don't know anything about. So I begin as a student and then I become a teacher, and I try to turn to readers and say, let me teach you about this amazing thing I learned about, And like a teacher, I have to figure out how can I tell you this story in the most compelling way that

keeps you engaged. And I don't have to include every single thing that I learned, because there's just too much, but instead create a narrative that will bring you into the story and you can follow the journey of learning about why this topic interested me. Susan or Leave New Yorker writer and the author of the library book about l a Library Fire. If you're as fascinated as I am by all things New Yorker, you should listen to my interview with the intrepid Tina Brown coming from Vanity Fair.

She was greeted with skepticism when she took over The New Yorker. It was much more open warfare against me at the New Yorker at the beginning, you know, because we had this huge kind of pushback from the old guard expecting that this was going to be me putting Demi Moore and in the magazine. I mean, first of the cartoonist Bob Mankoff. He thought that I was going to cancel all of cartoons and just put pictures in here. The full interview with Tina Brown in our archive at

Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing Now, more of my conversation with New Yorker writer Susan or Lean. In February, ten months after the worst library fire in American history, the l a p D arrested a man named Harry Peak. He confessed to starting the fire, and then he recanted. He confessed multiple times, actually and recanted multiple times with different alibis each time. It assumed that that was coached

by an attorney. Did a lawyer coach He didn't even have a lawyer for the first several times that he confessed and recanted. This was he confessed to friends, and friends turned him in as one's friends do. There was a reward. He had confessed multiple times two friends. He confess to the police in a casual interview where they were simply saying, what were you doing that day? Where were you? What happens in days prior to no video

cameras that are getting people in and out. There were simply security keeping people from coming into early There was no there's no record. Take your feet off the table exactly, and don't eat potato chips on the rarebus quiet and even today libraries are open to anybody, anyone can come in. That is both their greatest strength and sometimes their greatest challenge.

I did this movie with Emilio Estefays. He did this movie The Public and it's about a guy who's on the staff of the Cincinnati Public Library who joins a protest by homeless people who are denizens of the library, and a bane to the board of the library stage a demonstration and they seal off a section of the library,

takeover and have a protest of a demonstration. And the movie just screened at the Toronto Film Festival did quite well with great We all went up there, Michael Michael, Kay Williams and Taylor Shilling and all these wonderful actress who working film and m and Amelia plays the lead role. And the support he's gotten from the library community is really, really wonderful. They are a warm, friendly, welcoming place, full of interesting stuff costing nothing, and there aren't that many

places in our world that exists like that. So there was no record of Harry Pea coming into the library, as there was no record of anybody coming into the library. And in regards to him confessing and becanting, did he indicate any motive? Why did he do it? Once he confessed to the next question is why he never he never said. The library opens for employees or elier than it does to the public. So a door is open, a security guard sits there to make sure you have

an employee badge to get in. On that morning, a young man started walking in. The security guards stopped him and said the library is not open, and the young man apparently was annoyed by being stopped and left. The city's final explanation for why they believed Harry Peake did it on top of the fact that he had confessed, was that he was angry that the guard had turned him away. I want to get into the apple store early too. But did anybody venture what was wrong with him?

Did they get into his mental health? And that's part of what the mystery is because usually people who are pyromaniacs generally display that behavior fairly early in life. It's very rare for someone in their twenties who has no history ever and has never been to torch the l a central library. Did uh? Did experts determine how the

fire was set? It's a big question. Arson is the one of the most difficult crimes to analyze and investigate and In fact, it's the least successfully prosecuted felony for that very reason. Usually the means of starting a fire get destroyed in the fire. And believe it or not, libraries until the late eighties did not have sprinkler systems. Librarians, yeah, it's pretty shock library they didn't have sprinkler systems because

the worry was water is as damaging. Someone set them right, someone lights a match to you know, and and sneaking a cigarette back in the set and then boom, you've got your sprinkler systems going off in your books are going to be ruined. So the American Library Association until the late eighties advised against sprinkler systems. And this was before they had systems that use gas. And yeah, I mean this was not basically fired prevention at that time

was a sprinkler that would get triggered and sent. In fact, a great number of the books that were ruined in the fire were ruined by water that firefighters were. Yeah. Now you grew up in Cleveland, yes, and what did your dad do. He was a real estate developer, mostly a mom and part time worked in a bank. When you were growing up in that household, what were books and your childhood and what was yourn was a big reader. My parents were great library goers, and they grew up

in the depression. I think they felt, as many people who grew up in the depression felt, if you could borrow something, why would you buy it. They were not big on buying books. It was to them a luxury that was didn't make sense you could borrow a book. So we would go to the library all the time. I grew up going at least once a week, if

not twice a week, taking books out. I didn't start buying books till I was in college, and I think I was buying textbooks and suddenly became obsessed with owning books. My parents, to the day they died, they had the money to buy books. They lived through the depression and they had were very comfortable and could have afforded any books they wanted. They it was something that was embedded in them that you borrowed books from the library, you didn't buy them. So we didn't have a lot of

books in my house. Even when I go to Barnes and Noble, I love it, and I just said, I get the same feeling. I mean, I'm in a room full of books. It doesn't matter whose name is on the door by Lincoln Center, the one by now and when it closed, I was that was my Barnes and Noble. I was devastated. Not even the big one on Broadway in the old Shakespeare. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't go to that one. I didn't like that as much as that one by Lincoln Center. I loved that bookstore.

I'm gonna close. I was so sad. Oh it's it's a heartbreak. Now. I want to ask you, because we are going to run out of time, how does writing congeal in your life? Like when do you decide that's what you're going to do with your life? And it's a big commitment. I started writing when I learned to read, and I never thought I would be anything other than a writer. I wrote little books for my family when I was really young. I'm not trying to say it

was a prodigy. I just writing always seemed to me to be the filter through which experience made sense to me. Communicating telling stories seemed like a natural transaction between me and the world. Just it was just what I wanted to do. When I was probably in college, I realized what I really wanted to do was tell true stories. I didn't want to write fiction. I wanted to learn about the world, and particularly learn about things that they

hadn't noticed or hadn't thought about before. And trying to figure out how you do that for a living was of course a bit of a challenge. But when I discovered the New Yorker, I thought, ah, I get it now. This is where you write those kinds of stories where you examine life and tell their stories. So it was my dream to work there. And I'm lucky enough too. And I've never done any waitress but other than that,

I've never done any other jobs. Do you think that Orchid Thief was your most cinematic book, Well, the funny thing is I think none of them are. And yet what surprised you but that when they mean they made this into a very famous movie, we did that. Surprise you when we want to make it real. Surprise me. In fact, when it was optioned, and it was optioned immediately before I had even finished the book, I thought, I have no idea what these people think they're doing.

It's a very um, discursive, sort of reflective internal book. I cannot imagine how you're going to make a movie out of this. But that's not my problem, that's your problem. And I remember saying to a friend, They're gonna have to make the crime be a murder or something more dramatic than just stealing orchids is just impossible, and there's going to have to be some sex in it some how, and lo and behold, there you go. I mean, when I got the script for adaptation, I read it and thought,

you people are crazy. I don't know what you're doing, but at least I'm right you did have to put in a murderer and a car crash. I've had this funny relationship with Hollywood that I write things that I want to write, and I they are not conventional in any way in terms of Hollywood sense of a story, and yet they come knocking and I'm delighted. Well, I've never particularly been interested in it, but we are adapting this book for television, and I thought, you know what

I'm gonna I'm gonna give it a shot. I think it would be fun to try a different kind of writing. Um, but there's so many things I want to write about out in the world that um, I've never at. I want to be the one to adapt my work. I've always found it mostly people option my work, and I think I have no idea what you are going to do with this. So just call me when it's done and I'll come to the premiere. I'm very happy. Give me a few days notice so I can get my

dress to the drive. I feel about movies i'm in. I don't want to see the movie. They'll say, you want to see a kind of the movie. I'm like, no, welcome to the premiere. I suppose now that I live in l A, my interest in working on the adaptation of this book is more than it was when I lived in New York because I'm going to work on it with a friend who's a wonderful writer. Yeah. What do you think living in LA is going to do

to your writing? Boy? I wonder about it, except, um, you know, there are the stories that I'm interested in writing. I think are the same that they've always been, and I don't see a big change in that. I've lived in a lot of different places since I began writing. I lived in Boston and New York, in Upstate New York, um in Boston again, now in l A. And I my writing has remained really consistent. I think there are stories that I'll find out about because I live here

that I might not have seen otherwise. But in the heart of the writing, I feel that that's such an internal thing that where you're living doesn't affect it as much. You're married to John Gillespie. Last time I checked worked at the Lampoon. He did, and it is a very He's very funny. He's very funny. But he also says to me that the classic lampoon response to someone else making a joke is to simply, with a very straight face,

say uh huh, yeah, that's that's funny. I co wrote a book with Kurt Anderson, the Writing and Hurt and I did the Trump Parody book. Wrote a book called you Can't Spell America Without Me. It's a parody. And what was so riveting it was truly just overwhelming to me and just mesmerizing was how fast the book came out of it. He wrote it just like like weeks just came. He'd sent me, you know, chapters, and I was overwhelmed by how I give him notes. He's so

productive yet and he's so funny. So he and my husband were together and there were a lot of people who emerged from that couple of years. Um, well, the lampoon has always turned out amazingly clever, smart people, but that particular year there were a lot of people who have gone on to have quite illustrious careers. Is he still writing now? My husband, he wrote a book about corporate boards and how bad they are. Um, but mostly he's been in the financial world, which is funny. He

finds the funny. He exactly. Well, I want to say, because we're pretty much at a time, and I just want to say, in my town, Massapequa, Long Island, the Massapequa Public Library and very nice library, and it was centrally located. It wasn't like on some outpost where they could have got cheap land, you know what I mean. They just was right in the heart of town. You just got that special feeling of going to the library.

You went to the library and you were groomed almost Because my father was a teacher, I guess this is a part of it. Oh, there's an opportunity for me here. Something's gonna happen here. This is a sacred a place of real deliberation. We're gonna sit and we're gonna learn about the research for school, obviously, and looking up, you know about our var new Neez Kabata Devaka and the Explorers. We would study when we were in the sixth grade,

and they had two of the old style bookmobiles. They would be taken on the trailer hitch and it was it was parked in the parking lot the nine whole public golf course that existed in my neighborhood, and the and the parking lot of the golf course was across the street from my house, and we would walk across the street and go into this funky, weird bubble. It was like a little trailer and the woman was sitting

at the desk. It was almost like it was like doll furniture was like a little little desk she was at. And the books had all the little wooden slats to keep them from flying off the shelf. Uh. They had like these little guard rails they snapped on them when they traveled so they wouldn't come flying when the thing was driving. And I get a phone call from the Massive People Public Library and they say, you know this is over. You know we're gonna take these things. We're

gonna junk them. Would you like to buy one. I bought it kid, and I stuck it, and I stuck it in a little corner of my property on Long Island, and I put trees around it because my neighbors complained. My neighbors said to me, why do you have these decrepit structures? They said, what is this? These are real hamp the knights? Shall we say? One woman said to me,

she was I didn't realize we were living in Appalachia. God, she said, but I remember that feeling, you know, of going to that and getting those books, and you knew the value the plastic coating on them to protect the coverers and everything. And I remember the sacred experience and handling that material, And I think that you know, I

love bookstores too, and I love owning books. Like libraries, there is something special and sacred about the idea of it being a shared space with shared things, that we as a society have created this entity and we all sharing it together, and it works almost all the time. You take a book home, you read it, you bring it back, someone else takes it. It is democratic, small

d experience in the most really beautiful way. And going into a library and seeing a scholar and a teenager and a homeless person and a wealth person, and everyone has the same right to take the books. It feels great. It's like how I assume some people feel when they go to church. It feels right, it feels good. It makes me feel I get very emotional about it. I mean, and I'm going into a bookstore I love and it feels amazing and I want everything, and I love walking around.

That element of thinking, wow, we can really do things together as a society and have it work is particular to a library, and it feels so gratifying. I'm really looking forward to seeing a movie of this because that something tells me, like Orchid Thief, it's an unlikely subject into something that could become a very very engaging film. Thank you, I hope, but I hope. I hope it makes it to the screen in some fashion. Yeah, thank

you so much. I'm I'm excited about it, and I think, um, it will be a pleasure to highlight this world of libraries in some way. UM, because they really, especially at this moment in time when so much else feels so dark and trouble risk, they are real beacons in the world at the moment, and there's something about being in a room full of books. There's nothing else like it. You I do that now. I know it's completely acceptable

in l A. To snorted book. I'm gonna Susan Orleans latest, The Library, book about the devastation of the l A Central Library, is in stores now from Simon and Schuster. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.