I drove up to Everett the other day to spend some time at the little jewel box that is its central library, a space imagined by one of the region's finest 1930s Art Deco practitioners and filled not only with books, but also with wonderful Northwest art and a first rate coffee shop where I met up with Margaret Riddle and David Dilgard. Margaret is a staff historian at HistoryLink.org who spent a career at the Everett Library and David runs its nifty Northwest Collection.
The
harmonics on this day are particularly powerful. Nearby the library is the house of Roland Hartley, a
penny pinching governor who plotted against the architect who built the Everett Library, Carl F. Gould, forcing him out
as the founding Dean of the University of Washington’s School of Architecture
in an academic putsch that claimed as well the very top of the university’s
leadership, Henry Suzzallo, the school’s popular and effective president. That evening in October, 1926, three thousand
students massed around President Suzzallo's house chanting their support.
It was Gould who designed and supervised the building of the great, Gothic library on the University of Washington campus now named after Suzzallo. Nothing at the University of Washington is named after Hartley which seems about right. These reverberations and others are with me as we walk through the terrific library in Everett.
Historic Everett |
It was Gould who designed and supervised the building of the great, Gothic library on the University of Washington campus now named after Suzzallo. Nothing at the University of Washington is named after Hartley which seems about right. These reverberations and others are with me as we walk through the terrific library in Everett.
Everett Library |
As one of the few soft stops in an otherwise hard town, the library was soon too small and, with a gift of $75,000 from one of the former mill owners, the library board was able to attract some additional funds, $35,000 from the New Deal. It seemed improbable, but in the middle of the Great Depression they were looking for a designer to create a brand new $110,000 library. Carl Gould, the most prominent of the state’s architects from the firm Bebb and Gould, was their choice.
The building
today reflects the timing of their choice.
Gould had begun thinking about the design of the Seattle Art Museum in
Seattle’s Volunteer Park in 1931 and began working up ideas for the Everett
Library a few months after. Like the art
museum, the library design features gentle curves on the outside of the structure and in internal spaces that play off
the straight lines of its basic rectangular shape.
A later renovation and expansion in 1992 did a wonderful job of both restoration and new construction and provides an additional entrance, one that leads to the coffee shop and from there to the front hall of the building, through the reading room and its arching ceiling and then to a lovely terrace overlooking Gardner Bay.
A later renovation and expansion in 1992 did a wonderful job of both restoration and new construction and provides an additional entrance, one that leads to the coffee shop and from there to the front hall of the building, through the reading room and its arching ceiling and then to a lovely terrace overlooking Gardner Bay.
Many of Gould's designs have a Christmas tree quality to them, simple squares or rectangles creating the structure with decorative touches popping out of the simplicity. This lovely aluminum representation of a book is a piece done by Virginia Paquette and is part of the renovation and expansion and hangs above the new entrance. Gould would have been highly pleased by it.
There are four panels. One is of two Stone Age men carving on boulders. The person on the left is diligently creating creating pictographs on a stone, using a deer horn as a stylus. On the right, the second man is rubbing a sharp stone over the boulder. Pratt writes:
My favorite is the image of two monks copying their manuscripts, the light flowing up from a candle nearby and below. They look diligent, fat and comfortable, their work meticulous. They look fresh here, as if at work in the morning, after prayers. In the afternoons their minds cloud over, thinking of the wine they will drink and the sausages and onions they will consume that will make them even fatter.
“The square, blocky lines of the press, the tight-lipped, hunched-over printer, and the boredom of the apprentice as he counts the pages symbolize the advent of the machine age in literature,” Pratt writes.
Gould also asked another artist colleague, John T. Jacobsen, with whom he worked at the University of Washington library project, to produce murals for the Everett Library.
Jacobsen produced murals from the Pacific Northwest's history, starting with Vancouver's dropping anchor in Everett's Gardner Bay. You can see Jacobsen's images inside the Suzzallo Library as well.
The expansion done in 1992 created some new public spaces inside and it was clearly a beautiful job.
The big windows in the back of the reading room carry out the Art Deco theme elegantly while also letting in substantial natural light. It is a comfortable room surrounded by beautiful detailing in the woodwork and in a stained glass clock at the back of the room set off by an enormous half globe emanating light while hovering in the air at the room's center.
A window looking out from the children's room contains an aluminum piece, also done by Dorothy Paquette, that appears to show a flock of books on the wing, flying magically away to someplace only the children know.
Many of the
pieces in the library hail from the depression era Federal Arts Program and
back to the beginnings of the Northwest School, a group of artists who gave the
rough and tumble Northwest a place on the international arts map. The Federal Arts Program was supposed to get
money to artists whose livelihoods had melted away in the crisis. Some people
said there was nothing worth buying in the Northwest, but from the debris of
the Great Depression famously came the Northwest School’s finest artists --
Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Mark Toby, Morris Graves and many lesser known
but highly talented artists whose bread was buttered, in part, by the New
Deal.
As Harry
Hopkins, the Roosevelt sidekick who headed up the program, famously said:
“They’ve
got to eat like other people.”
In the
eight years it operated, the Federal Arts Program resulted in 108,000 paintings, nearly
18,000 sculptures, 11,200 print designs, 35,000 poster designs, 2,500
murals. Community arts centers were set
up across the country, employing artists to teach the theory and practice of art
outside its usual homes in the formal education system or in academia. It
also created the Index of American Design, a huge research program that showed how
Americans created art that explained their unique cultures across the
country.
Everett Public Library |
A 1923
modified Ford Model T was the bookmobile.
Named Pegasus, it is still kicking.
You can see the restored bookmobile at any serious parade in Everett.
Hartley is second from the right Everett Public Library |
Wikipedia Commons |
He moved on
to the state legislature where he became a perennial candidate for governor,
running as a Republican in 1916 and 1920, where he failed to get out of the
primary. In ‘24, however, he emerged from the primary with less than a percentage point lead. In a time when Republicans in Washington state were
solid locks in a general election, Hartley nearly got upset by the
Democrat. The new governor was not loved, but he could survive.
His survival cost his attorney general, John Dunbar, his marriage and his health. Hartley ignored Dunbar's advice, constantly put Dunbar in boxes he could not get out of and frustrated the man completely. Dunbar died a drunk after abandoning his wife and child.
His survival cost his attorney general, John Dunbar, his marriage and his health. Hartley ignored Dunbar's advice, constantly put Dunbar in boxes he could not get out of and frustrated the man completely. Dunbar died a drunk after abandoning his wife and child.
Henry Suzzallo University of Washington Libraries |
University of Washington Collections |
“Do they
really need all of them? Won’t two or
three do? And those hand-carved native
plants on the bookcases! What a waste!!”
Ground
broke on the new library in 1923 and, as it rose up in all its glory, Hartley
finally took over as Governor in 1924. After
just a year in office, Governor Hartley was pleased to note that two members of
the seven members making up the Board of Regents left in January, 1926 and he
replaced them quickly. Later, Hartley removed three other regents and replaced them with his own
people. Hartley now had five of seven regents and was ready to move.
Suzzallo
was brought before the Regents at 6:00 PM October 4, 1926 and asked to resign. He refused. The new UW Regents feared an even stronger political reaction if they fired him, so because his contract was up in
June of 1927, they took the action of placing Suzzallo on indefinite
leave. The two non-Hartley Regents resigned.
Governor
Hartley protested he knew nothing of Suzzallo’s removal, saying that his regents acted on their own. However, the
Seattle Times quickly pieced together a different story. The morning of the fourth, Hartley was staying
at the Olympic Hotel, a Gould and Bebb project, incidentally. He and his
group made a great show of leaving the hotel to head back to the office in Olympia. But the governor actually decamped to the New
Washington Hotel (today’s Josephinum), ordered up rooms and extra chairs, hosted
his brand new regents and played out the strategies and messages that would be deployed that evening. They decided
that the official reason for Suzzallo’s dismissal would be “discord between the
administration and some of the faculty,” a tried and true reason for axing a university president, then and now. Hartley left Seattle before the meeting began and was nearing Olympia when the deed was done.
It was a tradition to install a baseball diamond on the
side of the Times Building and follow, in real time,
World Series play.
University of Washington Collections
|
In a Seattle
Times edition almost completely dedicated to these stunning events, Blethen led with a front page editorial:
“Let’s Get
Rid of this Pitiful Man!”
“Picture a
small-spirited man who wears the habiliments of the governor’s office as a two
year old might wear Dempsey’s overcoat, and then look at Dr. Suzzallo, cultured, accomplished and
able!”
“Ten years
from now, Suzzallo will be a still greater name. But who will remember the governor who tried
to injure him?”
Three
thousand chanting students gathered around the President’s House at the
university. Finally, Suzzallo came out
the door to a five minute round of cheering. Suzzallo cautioned the crowd.
Guttormsen, on the right, did color commentary
for KOMO radio after graduation
|
Another
great cheer. Then George Guttormsen, a young
man from a sports-minded Everett family who was the president of the student
body and also the captain of the varsity football team, came forward.
“We come
here tonight to show Dr. Suzzallo our heartfelt appreciation for his work in
building up the university. We want to show
him our devotion to the University and his ideals.”
By the end
of the month, the Regents had forced out Gould as well, claiming that there was
some kind of conflict between being Dean of the School of Architecture and
having a financial interest in planning and designing buildings for the
university.
The Times later wrote that "an audit of the university books was ordered and the governor's accountant was going through all records like divine grace through a camp meeting."
Despite the Times support and that of the alumni associaition, the effort to recall Hartley ran out of gas and failed due to lack of signatures.
The Times later wrote that "an audit of the university books was ordered and the governor's accountant was going through all records like divine grace through a camp meeting."
Despite the Times support and that of the alumni associaition, the effort to recall Hartley ran out of gas and failed due to lack of signatures.
University of Washington Libraries |
Gould was a New Yorker from wealthy and accomplished families on both his mother’s and father’s sides. After Harvard, he attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the national fine arts school in Paris, where he stayed for five years, returning to New York to practice architecture.
As a young man in New York, he certainly had significant range as an assistant to older mentors. He worked on the layout of the Wisconsin State Capitol Building in Madison and on the planning for the rebuilding of San Francisco after the earthquake.
There is a bit of a mystery why he suddenly came to Seattle in 1908. Yes, he had been ill in 1907 and may have sought a healthier climate, but a good supposition is that he was practicing in New York along with three brothers-in-law, all architects, all accomplished. His health might have been the reason. It could also have been his elbows.
Larrabee House, Bellingham Lairmont Manor |
His design skills and taste in the arts led him quickly to many clients along the gold coasts of Capitol Hill, the Highlands, Lake Washington and Bainbridge Island, where Gould was a full time resident until 1920. He built residences for William E. Boeing, Clarence Blethen, the lawyer Lawrence Bogle, the lovely home in the center of a ten acre garden done by the Olmsteds for Arthur and Jeanette Dunn. There was the unusual Charles X. Larrabee home in Bellingham and one of the Seattle's first three car garages, in 1912, attached to the home of the David Skinner family.
Charles Bebb UW Libraries |
He also fought for the Bogue Plan, a city beautiful planning effort that failed to produce a civic center with grand boulevards spiraling out from the 4th and Blanchard area near Westlake. The decision to build the county courthouse where it is today, across the way from the Smith Tower, where most of the city’s lawyers were, doomed the Bogue plan.
His partnership with Charles H. Bebb in 1915 began the intimate association with the University of Washington that abruptly came to an end that Fall of 1926. He was able to finish his work on the Henry Art Gallery on the campus, largely because it was privately funded and tax money was not at stake.
After 1926, the Seattle Art Museum, the Everett Library, the Public Health Service Hospital were his major projects. He returned to the university after Governor Hartley left office, designing the College of Pharmacy and Smith Hall, along with a sorority house. He died in early 1939.
His buildings aren’t his only legacy. His daughter, Anne Gould Hauberg has been a primary force in Seattle arts as both a collector and patron for seventy years. One son became an architect and the other a research engineer.
Gould's illness was brief and his sudden death a surprise. Anne rushed home from school in the east and arrived on January 1, 1939, prepared to take his place at the firm until her father's illness was over. Gould died on the fourth.
Both Gould and Suzzallo died in the 1930s, Suzzallo six years before Gould in 1933, the library they built together was named for Suzzallo within a few days after Suzzallo's death. Gould Hall, the home of today's UW Architectural School, was named for Carl Gould in 1971. Their nemesis, Roland Hartley, though without a namesake public building, survived them by many years. He died in 1952 in his home in Everett at 88 years. The state government shuttered its doors for one hour during the time of his funeral, a touch he would have appreciated, though the tightwad in him might have said, "not enough hours."
Read About Dudley and Virginia Pratt
The Fall of John Dunbar and the Rise of Virginia Boren
Pacific Coast Architecture Data Base, Carl F. Gould
Index of American Design
Northwest Collection at the Everett Library
Dedication Program, Everett Public Library
Both Gould and Suzzallo died in the 1930s, Suzzallo six years before Gould in 1933, the library they built together was named for Suzzallo within a few days after Suzzallo's death. Gould Hall, the home of today's UW Architectural School, was named for Carl Gould in 1971. Their nemesis, Roland Hartley, though without a namesake public building, survived them by many years. He died in 1952 in his home in Everett at 88 years. The state government shuttered its doors for one hour during the time of his funeral, a touch he would have appreciated, though the tightwad in him might have said, "not enough hours."
Read About Dudley and Virginia Pratt
The Fall of John Dunbar and the Rise of Virginia Boren
Pacific Coast Architecture Data Base, Carl F. Gould
Index of American Design
Northwest Collection at the Everett Library
Dedication Program, Everett Public Library
Thanks for your kind words about the Everett Public Library. It is a community jewel, and I'm very proud of the work done by our staff.
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