In 1908 a group of people in St. Petersburg decided the town should have a permanent library, and it took them five years to get the money.
The newspaper editor went to New York himself to make the case. In 1913 the Carnegie Corporation awarded seventeen and a half thousand dollars.
The city matched it. A site was chosen on the banks of the city reservoir in July 1914, and on December 1, 1915 the doors opened with two thousand six hundred books on the shelves.
Stories like this one make me proud of ordinary citizens. A newspaper editor went to New York in person to argue for a library, and more than a century later the doors are still open. I’d trade a dozen glass-box civic centers for one building with that much stubbornness in its bricks. That reservoir is now Mirror Lake. The building is still there, still a library, and it’s been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1986.
What is Mirror Lake Community Library?
A branch of the St. Petersburg Public Library System at 280 5th Street North, on the edge of Mirror Lake in downtown St. Petersburg. The phone is 727-893-7268 and the site is splibraries.org. One hundred and sixty-seven Google reviews at four point two.
It’s a Carnegie library, one of ten in Florida funded by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York between 1901 and 1917, out of more than three thousand Andrew Carnegie paid for across the United States, Canada and Europe.
The architect was Henry D. Whitfield, who worked for the Carnegie Corporation and designed a great many of these buildings. The style is Beaux-Arts: buff brick, cast concrete string courses, pilasters, deep cornices, swags and sculptural detail scaled slightly larger than the building strictly needs. It’s one of the earliest examples of that style in the city and a contributing property of the Downtown St. Petersburg Historic District.
Beaux-Arts on a small library is gloriously over the top, and I adore it. Those swags and cornices were a city showing off about reading, and I wish more of our public buildings still had the confidence to do that. Visitors describe it as a beautiful historic site, and separately as a good working library with a nice selection, a good computer room, and copying and printing at a low price.
The people who built it
Three names come up in every account.
Councilman Ralph Veillard. W. L. Straub, editor and publisher of the St. Petersburg Times, who traveled to New York to pursue the grant in person. And Annie McCrae, who did a large share of the work and became the library’s first secretary.
The first librarian was Emma Moore Williams, who had previously been the first English teacher at St. Petersburg High School and was, by contemporary accounts, very good at it. Her assistant was Margaret Jenkins.
I admire Emma Moore Williams as a founder. A good English teacher turned librarian is about the best person a young city could have put behind that first desk. Five years of lobbying, a trip to New York, a matched grant and a schoolteacher turned librarian. That’s how a city of that size got a permanent library in 1915.
The part of the history that gets left out
Carnegie’s grants came with a condition. The libraries his money built were meant to be open to everyone, regardless of race. When this one opened in 1915, the city refused Black residents access to it.
That continued for nearly thirty years. In 1944 the city began permitting Black residents into the basement of the building, and no further.
Mrs. S. M. Carter, the wife of a local pastor, formed an interracial committee and lobbied the city for funding for a library that would serve the Black community. The James W. Johnson Library branch opened in 1947 as a result.
That history is shameful, and it should be known. For nearly thirty years the city kept some of its own people out of a library built with money meant for everybody, and then it offered them the basement. Mrs. Carter’s committee deserves to be as well known as the founders.
None of that diminishes the building. It’s part of what the building is, and any honest account of a 1915 public institution in Florida has to include it. A library that’s stood for over a century has a century of the city’s decisions built into it, good and otherwise.
What is there now
The building was expanded, first with an addition in 1951 and later with a further wing, and a restoration plan approved in 1987 refurbished the original 1915 section. An elevator and other accessibility work came with it, so the historic building is usable by everybody, which the original wasn’t. The program runs wider than most branches. Weekly story times. Therapy dog reading sessions, where children read aloud to a dog that won’t correct them. That’s one of the effective interventions for a reluctant reader. English language classes. Meditation workshops.
A child reading to a dog is the cleverest idea in children’s programming, and I’d put one in every library in the state. A kid who’s embarrassed to stumble in front of adults will read happily to an audience that only wags.
Museum passes and library cards are both sorted at the desk. One visitor described a very kind gentleman setting up cards, issuing museum passes and answering every question in a single visit, and mentioned that security were equally kind when asked about a service animal. The computer room and the printing get named repeatedly as good value.
What does Mirror Lake Library offer writers?
The building itself, first. If you’re writing anything set in Florida in the first half of the twentieth century, stand inside a 1915 Beaux-Arts interior that’s been in continuous use for over a century. The proportions, the light, the materials and the sheer civic confidence of the thing aren’t reconstructable from photographs. Second, the local history. A downtown branch in a historic district is a starting point for exactly the material that never makes it into a book, and the staff know what the system holds. Third, the location. Mirror Lake sits a few blocks from the downtown waterfront, so this can be one stop in an afternoon that also takes in Kerouac’s last address and the streets around it. For getting your own book onto these shelves, the piece on Pinellas library shelves covers how the system buys.
When is Mirror Lake Library open?
Monday and Wednesday from ten in the morning until eight at night. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday ten until six. Closed Sunday. Six days with two late nights. For a downtown branch that’s a workable schedule, and the Saturday opening matters since a lot of people only see downtown at the weekend.
5th Street North is in downtown St. Petersburg on the Mirror Lake side. Parking is street and downtown lots. That’s the usual downtown problem. From Clearwater it’s around twenty-five minutes. The Obama Main Library is a few minutes west if you need the main collection, and Book + Bottle is a short walk if you want a bookshop with a glass of wine afterwards.
Where it sits
St. Petersburg’s branches divide by job and this is the historic one.
The Obama Main Library is the reference hub with the café and a seven-day schedule. North Community lets you return books without leaving the car. West St. Petersburg unlocks at eight and keeps a playground in its lot.
Mirror Lake is the one where the building is the reason to go. A hundred and ten years old, still lending books, still running story times, in a room somebody designed to look like a city believed in itself.
Any writer in St. Petersburg who hasn’t stood in that room is missing the best free lesson in civic pride the city has to offer, flaws and all. I’d put this building on every visitor’s list ahead of anything with a gift shop.
