On your left stands Riverside’s main library, and this calm, modern building carries a rather dramatic family history.
The story begins long before this structure arrived at three thousand nine hundred Mission Inn Avenue. In eighteen seventy-nine, Riverside formed a library association, and its first keeper of books was James H. Roe, a druggist, teacher, and newspaperman. He kept the collection in the back of his shop and proudly told the town the books were available “day and night.” That sounds generous. It also sounds like the sort of promise that leaves a man very little peace.
By eighteen eighty-two, the growing collection moved to John Hamilton’s drugstore. Then, on the night of the twelfth of October, eighteen eighty-four, a huge fire tore through downtown. Residents rushed in, not only to fight the flames, but to rescue the books. They carried the volumes out by hand and stacked them in the middle of Main Street. It is one of those splendidly stubborn civic scenes: a town saving its stories before saving its furniture.
After the fire, the rescued books sat boxed in private homes until Mary Montague Smith, a widow and Riverside’s first official city librarian, gathered them back together. On the first of June, eighteen eighty-nine, she opened the Riverside Public Library in two upstairs rooms in the Handy Building. A few months later, the books moved again, this time to the Loring Building.
The library’s first great monument arrived when Andrew Carnegie offered twenty thousand dollars in nineteen oh one, roughly three quarters of a million in modern value, for a proper library building. He did not hand it over easily. His secretary, James Bertram, sparred with Riverside’s advocates, who thought the sum too small. Mary Evans brought in her husband, Lyman Evans, the local district attorney, and he pushed hard enough to secure the grant and the city’s matching funds. That campaign produced the Mission Revival Carnegie library, opened in nineteen oh three, then enlarged in nineteen oh nine with another Carnegie gift of fifteen thousand dollars, about half a million today, which finally gave children a room of their own.
Then came the painful chapter. In nineteen sixty-one, voters approved a one point seven million dollar bond, around eighteen million in today’s terms, for a new downtown library. The nineteen sixty-four building embraced New Formalism, a crisp, symmetrical modern style, and its facade carried interwoven screens with doves as a message of peace during the Cold War. But city leaders cleared the site by demolishing the beloved Carnegie building. Many residents were furious. One critic dismissed the replacement as a “soulless modernistic cube.” Oddly enough, that loss did something useful: it helped awaken Riverside’s modern preservation movement, because people decided they would not watch another landmark vanish so casually.
This present building opened in twenty twenty-one, designed by Johnson Favara, while the nineteen sixty-four library survived through adaptive reuse and became The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture. So the library’s history is not simply about books. It is about rescue, argument, reinvention, and a city learning how to protect its memory.
If you hope to return inside, the main library is closed on Monday, open from ten until eight Tuesday through Thursday, and open from ten until six Friday through Sunday.
Riverside has guarded these shelves with unusual determination, and that tells you a great deal about the city.
From rescue and renewal, the next stop is the Fox Performing Arts Center, where Riverside’s flair for performance takes over.
