While Frisco opts for more flamboyance

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 27, 1996 | by Gayle M.B. Hanson

New San Francisco facility reflects the flashiness and variety of California's trendy city.

It is probably the only library in the world that features a gigantic hat in the shape of the White House and a prominently displayed copy of Death of a Transvestite, the bizarre tale by late B-movie director Ed Wood Jr. about a guy on death row whose last wish is to die in women's clothing. But whether one views San Francisco as Byzantium by the Bay or Sodom by the Sea, one thing is certain -- the city's new main library is a civic triumph.

Designed by James Ingo Freed, a partner in the firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, which also designed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the library celebrates light, space and literature against a background of 300 humming computers -- and some public art that might best have remained private. Yet despite the occasional artistic glitches, the seven-story building, centered around an atrium that floods the library with natural light, has placed itself front and center at the convergence of new and old technology.

Gone are the card catalogs, but the cards remain, incorporated into a poignant mural created by Ann Chamberlin and Ann Hamilton. Each of the 50,000 cards contains a quote from the book itself, or mention of a related work. (Individuals were paid $1 per card for the project; one ambitious fellow filled out 10,000 of them and paid off his student loans.) These days, most information gathering is done on 300 computers available for public use that have become so popular the librarians are debating whether they will have to place a time limit on them.

While the library opened on April 18 -- the 90th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake -- to splendid reviews, it already has experienced its share of controversy. Critics are concerned about the influence of private donors: The library features the Chevron Teen Center, the Bank of America Foundation Jobs and Careers Center and the Koret Auditorium, for example, which they fear has opened the door to crass commercialization.

"This could be problematic," says one librarian, who asked that his name not be used. "Some of us worry that the corporate names on the doors might be sending the wrong message out to readers. Andrew Carnegie gave millions for public libraries and never asked that one of them be named after him."

Funded with a $1 million bond and $33 million in private donations, the library is a public building dedicated to its users.ib that end, there is an Asian Center, an African Center and a Gay and Lesbian Center within the main library, with additional services for the deaf and blind. Children have their own library in the main building, with a storytelling room in which movie star Robin Williams recently read from the Stinky Cheese Man, a current favorite among the under-10 set.

Indeed, the library has been a hit with kids such as Kishasa Jefferson, a 10-year-old who recently paid her first visit. Sitting at a computer, she beamed as if she were at Disneyland. "I love it," she cooed, looking up from her endeavors. "Id come here every day if I could."