It was 120 feet long, 25 feet wide, planned with seating for 150 people, and it was the first of its kind on campus.
In 1911, the completion of Doe Library greatly expanded the shelving and seating capacity from the University Library’s previous quarters in the Bacon Library and Art Museum building. But by 1920, Doe—still with plenty of room for books—could no longer meet student demand for reading and study space. The proposed Haviland Hall was an opportunity to relieve the congestion in Doe, and architect John Galen Howard included a library in his plans. When Haviland opened in 1924, it housed the first branch library on campus, serving as the primary resource for the largest graduate program in the University: Education.
Named in honor of Alexis F. Lange, the founder of the School of Education, the library incorporated his extensive collection of educational material, as well as the personal library of John Swett, California’s fourth (and most consequential) state superintendent of education. The holdings included education-related bulletins, pamphlets, reports, and surveys from state, county, and city school departments, educational foundations, and academic publishers. They also included results of intelligence tests conducted in schools. “Text books have been donated by publishing companies to acquaint students with them,” the Daily Cal reported, and there was, it added, a “shelf of interesting books for general reading”
(Daily Californian, Mar. 18, 1925, p. 2).
Gathering and organizing this material took place in the spring and summer of 1924, and in October, the Lange Library of Education opened its doors for the first time. With 5,000 volumes, 10,000 pamphlets, and 92 periodical titles, the library was primarily intended for graduate students and faculty conducting education research, and it was designated as a reference collection exclusively for in-house use. The library featured eight mahogany reading room tables designed by John Galen Howard.
The Western Journal of Education called the library “the heart of Haviland Hall” for its scholarly importance. The Daily Cal celebrated other virtues. In the halls were to be 300 coat and hat lockers, plus 100 umbrella lockers, which particularly piqued the newspaper’s favor. “Students will no doubt give Haviland library the preference on account of the vast array of coat hooks available,” it wrote. The ceiling, finished in an ornate style known as stiacciato relief, caused the newspaper to proclaim that it “will be a masterpiece of the plasterers’ art, and may lead to day dreaming on the part of students” (Daily Californian, Jan. 25, 1923, p. 3).
Despite being intended as a graduate library, and despite its being far from the center of campus (nestled in a crook of Strawberry Creek), the library was open the same full-time hours as the University Library—including nights and weekends—and received heavy use. In 1934, the library expanded into what had previously been the School of Education’s statistical data room, and ten years later, plans were being made for an additional expansion of the library.
The Education Library’s tenure in the building, however, ended with the construction of the new Education-Psychology building, Tolman Hall, in 1962. The library relocated there in August 1962, to be succeeded by the School of Social Welfare and Criminology.
But before the new library moved in, the second floor was substantially altered, and not particularly for the better. The dean’s office and related administrative offices relocated, moving from the second floor’s north end to downstairs; the second floor space was then reconfigured into faculty offices. To accommodate the Social Welfare-Criminology collection, library stacks were packed into a large seminar room across the corridor from the library. The corridor was walled off—chocolate brown bands across the floor now mark the locations of those walls, and a bookcase has replaced the library circulation desk—and the former Lange Library, shelves stripped of books, was reduced to a cold, echoing, and barren passageway from one end of the building to the other. These degradations would not be corrected until 1986, and the library would not be restored to its full beauty until 2015.
Or almost fully restored, perhaps, as there was one notable exception: the elegant Beaux-Arts lights that graced the reading room ceiling had been replaced in 1963 with charmless institutional banks of fluorescent lights running the length of the reading room. The subsequent renovations removed the worst aspects of these lights but still retained the fluorescent lighting scheme. Sadly, the original Beaux-Arts lights have long since disappeared—though not completely. A single sibling of the library’s lights remains, and it hangs above the entrance to Doe Library. Perhaps future restorations will manage to recreate the Lange Library’s original hanging lamps, and then Haviland Hall’s library will finally be returned to its original magnificence.