4 Years After the Library Burned: A Continuing Saga

Four years have passed since the morning that Fahrenheit 451 came to 5th and Flower streets, when the Los Angeles Central Library went up in flames at the hand of an arsonist.

The books incinerated over the span of a long lunch hour would have stocked ten lesser libraries. All the money to replace them, and to raise up a new library around them, would supply nearly 4,000 new policemen for one year.

This was no victimless crime. It was an assault on the city family, and the survivors still reckon with the consequences.

For the firefighters: Six hours of heroics in steam and flame, followed by four years with a case that trickled out of their fingers like ashes. They think they know who did it, but there was not enough evidence to file charges. The state’s statute of limitations has run its limit, the federal statute has but a year to go, and the whodunit waits unresolved, unsettling as an unstruck match.

For the library: If a library is books and not a building, almost three years went by without a central library, when the knowledge and wit of nearly a million and a half volumes were in storage, at a cost of $1,000 a day. Librarians worked like stevedores in secret warehouses, cleaning and boxing books. A year ago, in the new temporary downtown library, they began to be librarians again, unpacking and shelving both intact books and 55,000 boxes of restored flash-frozen books touched by water or soot. They are still replacing the 400,000 lost volumes, 20% of the original collection.

For the city: Four years of budgets and blueprints have yielded plans for a splendid new facility, a hole in the ground eight stories deep, and now $18 million in unforeseen new bills. In the political afterglow from the fire, there was a hard push for library restoration; now, as the years roll away and the bills roll in, a downtown library seems not so urgent. A $90-million bond issue to improve several branches and help restore the Central Library, the heart of the system, failed to get the required two-thirds voter approval.

Today, the shell of the old library stands ready to be restored and reoccupied. A temporary library operates on Spring Street. The new library is still but a sheaf of plans and a building site waiting for a building.

What book might investigators and prosecutors select from a library’s shelves to speak to these four years? “Crime and Punishment,” perhaps, waiting for some Raskolnikov to reveal his hand and confess.

As the 350 or so firefighters finished their work in the smoking ruin of a library, the investigators’ job began. Fire Capt. Steve Cohee assembled a task force of police, all 19 of the Fire Department’s overworked arson investigators, and at least a dozen arson agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, some local and some from a national strike force, who happened to be here the day the library burned.

Arson was determined within days of the April 29 blaze. In an intense few weeks, investigators talked to library employees and library patrons, anyone who “perhaps saw something.” Investigators went “canvassing the neighborhood for passers-by or people out of the hotels or businesses that neighbored the place,” said investigator Mike Matassa of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Leads were pursued that “on a lesser priority investigation you might think, ‘This doesn’t deserve the manpower commitment,’ but in that particular fire just about anything feasible was followed up on.”

It was one arson even civilians asked about, said Cohee. “It was a very public fire. . . . It became very political.” And that “put a lot of pressure on working the case.”

A note went out in each city worker’s pay envelope--if you know anything, please call. A $30,000 reward was posted. A hot line took hundreds of calls.

Why posed as elusive a question as who . Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Savitt, a widely regarded arson specialist, said that without eyewitness or confession, motive remains a valuable lead--spite, financial gain, or something the investigators have not even imagined. In this case, Savitt said, “it’s possible someone could hate the library, but how would you go about establishing such a case?”

Then, five months later, came a second arson, committed in a sheaf of classical sheet music. By then the library was supposedly off limits to all but staff and security, but it began just after 6 p.m., when most had left for the day. The building was not all that secure, some said; a person could even have climbed up a nearby tree and into a window. A second investigative operation was opened.

“I believe we have a motive in the second fire,” said Savitt, but as it would turn out with the first, “there’s just not enough evidence to believe you could successfully prosecute.”

Not long after the April fire, investigators circulated two composite sketches of a man seen in the stacks, a man they wanted to question. They were published, televised, posted in branch libraries.

Among the hundreds interviewed over the months was a 28-year-old aspiring actor named Harry Peak. His name came via a telephone call from a woman “who said she recognized the composite and believed it was Mr. Peak, who had just changed his appearance immediately after the composite picture came out,” said Deputy City Atty. Victoria G. Chaney.

In February, 1987, Harry Peak was arrested.

Within hours, Mayor Tom Bradley was congratulating investigators “for a job well done.” Fire officials used words like “convinced” and “no doubt.”

Three days later Peak was released.

The district attorney’s office said that although there was “clearly probable cause” for an arrest, not enough evidence existed to pursue the case. It rated a “referral”--which means, investigate some more. In this case, said a firefighter, it meant “forget it.”

It was fire investigators who made the initial recommendation not to file after they “reached a dead end (and said) they didn’t have enough evidence to file a case,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen Kay said at the time. They had hoped for a confession or more information, but Peak asked for an attorney.

Peak’s friends protested that he was just a misunderstood guy who sometimes loved to weave more flash than truth into his doings, and that he had just gone too far this time.

Peak, according to attorney Chaney, produced an assortment of varying, detailed alibis for friends and investigators. He was rescued out of a second-story window and carried down a hook-and-ladder by “a cute fireman” . . . he was standing across the street with a Superior Court judge, watching the library burn . . . he was inside doing work for the San Francisco legal firm, which now represents him, when someone started yelling, “You have to get out of here, there’s a fire,” and on his way out he bumped into a little old lady . . . he had gone to visit a podiatrist friend and heard about the fire as they were having brunch.

And so on. Officials said there were seven such versions in all.

The state statute of limitations ran out three years after the determination of arson, said Savitt. Federal investigators, whose statute runs five years, had already closed their case, but reopened it in June, 1989, said ATF spokesperson April Freud, “at the request of the Los Angeles Fire Department.”

From the city, there is “no new information” in the investigation, said Fire Capt. Lon Purcell, “absolutely no change in where we were a year ago.”

The struggle between the city and Harry Peak has moved into the more complex arena of civil litigation. Peak filed a lawsuit two years ago against the city, saying, in effect, “You ruined my life.” A subsequent city suit says, in effect, “You ruined our library.”

Peak’s public arrest in February, 1987, made him notorious; his equally public release from custody does not seem to have made him less so, said his attorney, Leonard J. Martinet of San Francisco. “He is not only being pursued, he’s being dragged through the wringer.”

Peak’s lawsuit for $15 million alleges that he was falsely imprisoned, assaulted and battered, his privacy invaded, his name slandered, emotional distress inflicted and his constitutional rights violated. It splutters with indignation, noting in boldface the most egregious charges: That after Peak’s release, a Fire Department official still called him the “perpetrator of the fire . . . a guilty man . . . the people of L.A. are going to be wondering why can’t we have this individual.”

Martinet said he intends to take depositions “up to the mayor. I think it was at some level, the mayor’s level, that precipitated this. They had to make a move. The public wanted someone to be pinned for the fire.”

He would not permit Peak to be interviewed for this article, and he would not comment on the multiple versions of Peak’s whereabouts. In the lawsuit, Peak now maintains he was nowhere near the library at the time of the fire.

A motion for summary judgment should be filed within weeks, he said, which will clarify “why he explained various things to various people and why they were misconstrued.”

Since his arrest, Peak has moved to Palm Springs. “He couldn’t handle it any more,” his attorney said. “Any time he went anywhere, police made even routine stops, so he had to leave the county.” He is “mainly doing odd jobs, trying to work (in) hotels and various areas where the media wouldn’t find him.”

In Los Angeles, Martinet went on, Peak’s “name is in the memory of various potential employers. He’s an actor trying to seek employment. When he goes to acting jobs, or acting classes even, people recognize either his name or his likeness,” and he has “gotten job turndowns.”

Martinet would not say what jobs Peak had lost.

“I think the biggest problem for the poor guy,” he said, “is he knows there’s a piece of paper out there claiming he’s the cause of a $20-million loss.”

That piece of paper, the city’s cross-complaint, was filed two months after Peak’s own suit.

A civil case has a latitude that a criminal one does not, a different standard of proof, and allows a judgment on the agreement of nine jurors out of 12. Also, there is greater pretrial access to witnesses. All of this, city officials hope, will be to their advantage.

The cross-complaint holds Peak accountable for $23.6 million, for property damage, restoration, storage, workers compensation for injured firemen, for every page that burned, for every gallon of water that was poured onto the fire.

As for the chances of recovering such monies from a man last known to be looking for work in Palm Springs: “For all I know he may win the lottery tomorrow,” said Chaney.

“Stranger things have happened.”

For the library staff, “Grapes of Wrath” might do, a tale of people shoved out of their homes by adversity and looking for a life elsewhere.

In the days after the fire, they worked in the charred, smoky, unheated building awash in ashy water. Then they moved to stoop labor in warehouses, hauling and loading and packing the volumes that hadn’t been burned or wet so badly they had to be flash-frozen to be saved. Linda Moussa, senior librarian in the social sciences section, came to like the novelty of wearing jeans and toiling out her days dockworker-fashion.

“We giggled about it,” she said. “If we didn’t like working as librarians we’d just go down to Long Beach harbor and offer our services.” Nonetheless, “the whole routine was just thrown up into the air and whatever shook down was what you had to do, a kind of activity you never would have imagined yourself doing. Some got through with no problem. Others were just totally discombobulated. They needed the structure and routine of what it was before the fire.”

Some librarians retired, some left for branch libraries, some left for medical reasons--dust, asbestos removal at the old library.

All that time, hopes rose and fell for a temporary site. Every major abandoned department store in downtown was considered and rejected before the library was opened a year ago in the Design Center on Spring Street, at a cost of $260,000 a month--about a dollar a square foot. There, patronage is back to 60% of what it was before the fire. Some of the old regulars have died, but new patrons have come along.

At the temporary library, eight floors of clean, new building with good lighting, new shelves, and, at last, books to work with, have made all the difference to morale undermined by delays and still plagued by staff shortages. Dan Strehl, senior librarian of general library services: “There’s nothing like saying, ‘OK, we’ve got 2 million books in random order, let’s sort them out.’ ”

Through the three lost years, Strehl’s 5,000 weekly pieces of mail kept arriving. Periodicals were shelved once, then “we had to reshelve everything after the Whittier quake.” Then again, when an aftershock collapsed the old shelves. When the new shelves were filled, they had to be moved again. “After the third time they were getting real cross.”

Librarians still take Christmas-morning pleasure in opening boxes to find what survived the fire. Literature and fiction librarian Helene Mochedlover finds it so “exciting to be open, I hadn’t even thought about the anniversary of the fire.” Her department, and Billie M. Connor’s all-but-vanished science and technology, have had the longest way to climb back.

The entire patents collection vanished, most of Literature A to J, much of the sciences. Of the $10 million raised by the Save the Books campaign, about a third has been spent already.

Other collections have come as gifts. A sampling: A chess collection; a complete Louis L’Amour hard-bound set donated by his widow; Edgar Rice Burroughs volumes from his family; 14,000 reels of replacement microfilmed periodicals; scientific manuals from such as the Chemical Society and Shell Petroleum collections; and 1,400 cookery books from the estate of a man in the Midwest. There are wide gaps yet to fill.

As much as half of the books are out on public shelves, compared to 15% at best in the old library. And Library Commissioner Martha Katsufrakis says that as a result of the fire and rebuilding, “We have the most complete inventory of probably any library in the world.”

The ready reference desk is open and taking calls, a computerized catalogue is up and working, whole collections are indexed on disks--a taste of what the rebuilt library’s $18 million automation service will provide.

The Security Pacific-Wells Fargo historic photo collection is now cross-referenced, says Strehl, so a person can go in and find, say, a picture of Tom Bradley with a dog.

The city’s book of choice as it struggles through the restoration effort is one not found on any library shelf: Donald Trump’s checkbook.

The job of restoring the burned library and building an annex has proven to be more expensive than ever imagined. There has been some political grumbling about the mounting costs.

Bill Mercer is chief administrative analyst for the city. Like a pioneer who stops to think it all over halfway between icy mountains and trackless desert, there is no going back: “I know it costs more but we really have no option at this point,” said Mercer.

“We’ve got a hole, a demolished building, paying rent on a temporary library. We don’t have any options. I understand the resentment some council members expressed that we’ve come to them saying ‘This is it, you’ve got to come up with the money,’ but the options at this point are just further delays and further costs--unless someone suggests we abandon this project, and that’s the only way to save money.”

The new extra costs total $31 million. To cover them will require $18 million from the city, $4 million from the Community Redevelopment Agency, and $9 million from interest-bearing accounts.

The $31 million would pay for the unforeseen cost of hauling away hydrocarbon-poisoned dirt from the hole, of venting methane gas, of getting rid of asbestos, of patching and propping up the cracks and splits every time the earth shivers through the 64-year-old library that the city has pledged to save.

It would mean the overall budget for the library project would rise from $180 to $211 million.

The city will consider its portion of the new costs in a week or so. “The award for the contract has to be made by the end of May. If not, negotiating delays with (contractor) Tutor Saliba will cost us more, looking at staying in the temporary library will cost us more, and telling us to go back and redesign will cost us more.”

Wait is not the word Mercer wants to hear. Haggling over design issues and cost-cutting measures have gobbled up time. Three years ago, word was the new library would open in March, 1991. Now it is April, 1993.

It is an ugly notion, and not an easy one to voice, but one librarian said this: “I think the politicians would still be piddling over whether to move us out. The fire forced it. I’m sorry the fire happened but, all things considered, maybe it was the best thing at the time.”

Yet around all four sides of the old Central Library, from other and busy construction projects, jackhammers stutter and whine. The library, behind its wall of nine-foot boards, stands empty and shut up, its windows cracked or smudged or covered altogether.

Smoke stains have begun to fade from the west facade, from the massive bas-relief figures of Phosphor and Hesper, the morning and evening stars. When the sunlight casts oblique shadows, the Latin inscription above them can still be picked out. It is a passage from Lucretius and concerns an ancient torch-race and passing on the flame of knowledge.