The first Harbor City public library came into existence just four years after lots in the area’s first subdivision went on sale in 1912.
On Feb. 21, 1916, the county of Los Angeles started a small library in the new community between Torrance and Wilmington. The library’s exact site remains unclear, other than that it was located in a local real estate office building. In July, the county passed management of the new branch to the city of Los Angeles, which already had established branches of its Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) in Wilmington and San Pedro.
The San Pedro branch of LAPL was assigned to manage the Harbor City branch on Sept. 1, 1916, and Mrs. G.G. Todd was named the custodian of its 1,100-book collection. The new library was open on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons.
As the area grew, its residents made increasingly good use of the tiny library, and it soon began to outgrow its location. In March 1919, the area’s Chamber of Commerce called a large public meeting in order to form the Harbor City Public Library Association. Its purpose: to acquire land and secure funding to build a new library building.
It took five years, but the new library finally was built at 2216 253rd St., near Belle Porte Ave. The tiny 15–by-20-foot structure opened in 1924.
In 1928, Mrs. Anna Milligan became its librarian. She told the San Pedro News Pilot in 1936 that when there were ten people in the building she hesitated to leave her chair for fear of disturbing some of them, but during all her years there, she had never complained about close quarters —nor of monotony.
The library remained on 253rd St. until after World War II, when the LAPL bosses determined that a move to larger quarters was necessary. A larger storefront at 25318 Belle Porte Ave. was rented in 1948, and the Harbor City library branch occupied it for the next five years.
In library terms, it was known as a library station, which is much smaller than a full-sized branch. The community was promised that money for a full-size permanent branch library to replace the storefront would be in the city’s library department budget for the 1950-51 year. Unfortunately, the final city budget ended up not including that funding.
In 1953, a study by LAPL management indicated that 75% of the branch’s users were children. The minority number of adults using the library led LAPL to conclude that a different, less costly way could be used to serve the Harbor City residents who used it most.
In 1948, LAPL had conducted a survey on the use of a new idea, bookmobiles, by libraries throughout the country. It found that by using bookmobiles, also called traveling branches, the library could cut down on building rental costs while still having the ability to expand service to a larger geographic area.
Therefore, it was decided that after the Harbor City branch library’s last day of service on Oct. 15, 1953, it would be replaced by bookmobile visits to area schools every other Monday from 2-4 pm.
It may have been a victory for efficiency and statistics, but it left out those who needed the services of a permanent library, be they children or adults. San Pedro and Wilmington, the nearest LAPL branches to Harbor City, weren’t all that near.
Sadly, the community would be left without the long-promised library branch for the next 44 years.
The drive to resurrect the planned branch began with one person, Rochelle Bullock. In 1980, she organized a group of people to canvass area residents with petitions calling for the fulfillment of the 1950 promise.
Her work had some effect. When LAPL issued its master plan for branch management in 1988, the planned Harbor City branch was on the list, but not near the top. Bullock redoubled her efforts, paying repeated visits first to L.A. City Council member Joan Milke Flores, then to her successor, Rudy Svorinich, to plead the case.
City budgets were lean during the early 1990s, but Svorinich put together a successful block grant proposal to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to fund the establishment of the new library.
Bullock died in 1995 at 79, before her dream could be realized. The new library opened on Aug. 7, 1997, in a 6,300-square-foot storefront in the Victory Center mini-mall at 1555 Sepulveda Blvd., right behind an Arby’s restaurant.
That facility, always a temporary solution, operated there for ten years. After funding was obtained during the early 2000s, a parcel of land was acquired at 24000 S. Western Ave., just north of Narbonne High School.
Construction began on a new full-size, free-standing branch library building on the site in 2006, and the $10 million, 14,650-square-foot Harbor City – Harbor Gateway Branch Library opened to the public on Feb. 1, 2007.
Open every day except Sunday, the modern branch offers dozens of computers to the public in addition to more than 60,000 books and other media, meeting and group study rooms and a large children’s department.
Sources:
Daily Breeze archives.
Los Angeles Times archives.
San Pedro News Pilot archives.
“Tribute to the Traveling Branch,” by Tiffney Sanford, LAPL blog, April 11, 2018.
