Northside Neighborhood Center
THE NORTHSIDE NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER · 1552 KANE ST., LA CROSSE
The public fought 37 years for this building.
Through a world war, three tied votes, a lawsuit and delay after delay, it was built. 84 years later it closed.
We are opening it again — as intended, for the use and betterment of our people.
In March 1905 somebody set 225 books on a shelf in the Brakke Drug Store at 1353 Caledonia Street, and the north side of La Crosse had a library. Two years later it moved next door to 1351 Caledonia St., into a rented room with a partition down the middle.
By 1914 it held more than 2,500 books and was doing a quarter of the entire city library's circulation.
It was still the rented room. It stayed in rented rooms for 37 years.
Not for want of asking. By 1933 the library's own officials had it on the record — poor light, poor ventilation, nowhere near enough room. That year the Business Men's Club appointed a committee. In 1934 the well-known La Crosse architect Otto A. Merman drew the plans.
The council ordered them placed on file. In 1937 the library board asked for the fourth time in four years. The council answered with a survey.
The North Side Library in 1941 at the corner of Logan and Caledonia Streets. It started just next door in 1905 inside Braake Drug Store when someone placed 225 books on a shelf. At the time the new building was built, it had 8,068 books and 39 magazines with a circulation of 89,632 - with the highest number of readers being children.
The original Northside Library still stands at the corner of Caledonia & Logan Streets.
That September the trustees came before the council committees and said they were ashamed. One of them stopped citing figures and described how the branch librarian had got through the previous winter at her desk.
"Two pairs of woolen stockings over her regular stockings, as well as galoshes, while at work."
Gysbert Van Steenwyk, to the Common Council committees, September 9, 1937
Four years of circulation figures had not moved the council. One woman's feet did. That night it ordered plans, specifications and sites.
The next morning the federal money ran out.
What followed was four more years of getting close and losing it again.
- A bond the people approved, and then lost when Washington rescinded the grant.
- A file closed by a Congress that had gone home.
- A fight over which street corner — tied three times, and lost once to an error in the council's own tabulation.
- A lawsuit from the losing bidder.
- A world war that nearly stopped the work.
"Disappointment has met on disappointment."
The La Crosse Tribune's editorial board, looking back over eight years of it on the morning the Common Council voted whether to put the library bond to the people — and pressing the aldermen not to cut the amount. March 14, 1941.
At every single one of those stops, the push to start again came from outside the council chamber.
- A businessmen's club that kept the same two men on the question for eight years.
- A chamber of commerce that wrote eight typewritten pages.
- A newspaper editorial board that ran six editorials over four years telling the aldermen to get on with it.
- A woman named Anna Mashek, who did the arithmetic in the letters column.
- A downtown taxpayer who wrote in to say the north side was owed.
- That same newspaper again — when the aldermen deadlocked a third time, it gave up on editorials, printed a ballot, and asked the neighborhood directly.
171 people filled in that coupon in a single day.
The council voted that night, and did what the north side had said.
The library opened on Monday, August 31, 1942, at three in the afternoon. No ceremony — the landscaping was not finished. It cost $56,591.58. It had a fireplace in the children's room, a rack outside for 72 bicycles, and a club room in the basement with its own front door, where the north side women's club had already arranged to meet before the doors even opened.
The building served for 84 years. In June 2026 it closed. We are raising $3 million to buy 1552 Kane St. and open it again — starting with that basement, which was built for people to gather in and is about to be again.
WHO ACTUALLY DID THIS
Not one of them held the office that could have built it.
Three librarians. A minister and a schoolmaster. A banker. A housewife or a clerk — we still do not know which. Somebody downtown who would not sign their name. And 171 people who posted a coupon. None of them could appropriate a dollar or let a contract. What they had was a conviction that a city owes its public somewhere decent to go, and the patience to keep saying so until somebody acted on it.
Miss Mary Alice Smith
She put 225 books on a shelf in a drug store in 1905 and then spent nine years arguing for something better. By 1914, her last full year as head librarian, the branch she had started was doing a quarter of the entire city's circulation out of a rented room.
"More pride in the housing of an institution helps to increase the value of the institution in the eyes of its patrons."
Lilly M. E. Borresen
Head librarian for thirty-one years, longer than anyone before or since. She told the council in 1937 that it was the fourth time of asking since 1933. She said circulation was a perfect barometer of unemployment, and she had the figures to prove it. When the architect left for the army camp at Sparta, she worked out the final details of the building herself.
She planned two branch libraries. The war let her finish one.
Anna B. Pederson
She joined the library staff in 1907 and became the north branch's librarian in 1911 — sixty-one years as its leader, until she retired in 1972 at eighty-seven. In the rented store she worked out how to shelve more children's books than she had room for: adults on the top three shelves, children on the lower four, where the small ones could reach them.
Thirty-one years in the store. Thirty more in the building she finally got.
Rev. Hugh R. Kinley and Prof. H. G. Hayden
The minister of the north side's own Methodist church and the principal of the Franklin and Roosevelt schools. The Business Men's Club appointed the two of them in 1933 to ask whether Washington would help pay for a library. It would not. They were still writing reports about it seven years later, and still asking in 1941.
Eight years of asking. Kinley died in July 1943, eleven months after the doors opened.
Gysbert Van Steenwyk
A library board trustee who did the arithmetic in public: the City of La Crosse had never, in its entire history, spent money building a library. Four years of circulation figures had not moved the council. So in September 1937 he stopped citing figures and described the branch librarian's feet instead.
"Our libraries should come next."
The Tribune's editorial board
Six editorials in four years, telling the aldermen to get on with it. When the council deadlocked over the site a third time in four weeks, the paper gave up on arguing, printed a ballot, and asked the north side directly.
"Disappointment has met on disappointment."
Anna M. Mashek
She wrote to the letters column in March 1941 and costed it out for her neighbors: of every dollar of city tax, one and one-tenth cents went to the library fund. On an eighty-dollar tax bill, that was eighty-eight cents. She reminded them the city had never spent a cent on library land or buildings.
"The library is the university of the working man and his family."
"A Taxpayer"
An unsigned letter from the middle of the city, worried that nobody would bother to vote. La Crosse spent sixty cents a head on its libraries; Madison spent $1.28, Green Bay $1.15. The downtown had a decent library. The north and south sides had helped pay for it and gone without.
"It is no more than fair."
171 people
On July 11, 1941, the Tribune printed a coupon and asked the north side to choose the site. A hundred and seventy-one people filled it in — posted it, walked it into the Tribune's north side office on Clinton Street, or carried it downtown before ten in the morning. Briebach 85, Bollrud 59, Logan high school grounds 27. The council bought the Briebach property that night.
24 hours.
Every one of them was volunteering. The building exists because enough ordinary people decided, for 37 years running, that their town ought to have somewhere good for its public to be — and then kept asking after everyone with the authority to say yes had said not now.
NOW
In June 2026 the City closed it and put it up for sale. We asked for it.
The City selected the Northside Neighborhood Center's proposal. We are raising $3 million to buy 1552 Kane St. and restore it as what it has always been: a place on the north side where people go to be among other people.
There is a marker on the corner of Gillette and Kane. It records that the building went up in 1941–42 as an English Tudor bungalow, designed by a local architect to sit comfortably among the houses around it. Somebody decided this building was worth marking long before we came along.
The State of Wisconsin has surveyed it three times, most recently in 2019. The survey's own words: the interior retains its integrity and original woodwork, and — as of that visit — the building had served as a library every day since it opened. We are buying something that was looked after.
The Club Room
Becomes Public Space Again
We are not changing what this building is for. Interestingly, one of the room we are restoring for public use is the room the building created in 1941 so that neighbors would have somewhere to meet — designed with its own access door out back.
Concept
Current Room
Current Room
It took a drug store, four civic groups, two referendums, a one-vote margin and 171 newspaper coupons to open this building the first time. None of it came from the top.
We aim to reopen in spring 2027.
We are asking again.
HELP US FILL IN THE GAPS
In 1941 the Tribune printed a ballot and asked the north side to choose. We are asking what you remember.
Almost everything on this page came out of a newspaper. The 84 years after the doors opened did not get written down, and those are the years most people were actually there for.
- Who lived in the house on the corner of Gillette and Kane before the library did? The city bought it from the Briebachs in 1941. We do not have their first names.
- Was there ever a privet hedge around the grounds, or a flower garden at the back?
- Do you remember the box elder tree in the middle of the Kane Street sidewalk?
- Who worked there? Six people carried 10,000 books into the building in 1942 and we can name only one of them.
- Do you have photographs — of the building, of the old branch on Caledonia Street, of yourself in it?
The short way through
1905
225 books on a shelf in Brakke's drug store at 1353 Caledonia Street.
1907
The branch moves next door to 1351. It lends 13,818 books in its first year.
1911
Anna B. Pederson becomes the branch librarian. She holds it sixty-one years.
1914
More than 2,500 books in a rented room — a quarter of the city library's circulation.
1932
Peak year: 89,634 books lent from a collection of 8,068.
1933
Hours are cut. The Business Men's Club appoints a committee. Federal aid will not come.
1934
Otto Merman draws the plans. The council orders them placed on file.
1937
March: the library board's fourth request in four years. The council answers with a survey.
1937
September 9: the council orders plans, specifications and sites. The next morning the federal money is gone.
1938
August: the board names its corners. The council votes 10-9 against building inside Logan High School.
1938
Autumn: La Crosse votes a $62,000 bond for two branch libraries.
1939
September 9: the applications come back unopened. Congress had adjourned.
1940
The Chamber of Commerce adopts an eight-page report.
1941
January: the Business Men's Club asks for a second referendum, to untie north from south.
1941
April 1: the referendum passes. About a third of the city votes.
1941
June 13: the site vote fails on a tabulation error. 11-9 becomes 10-10.
1941
July 11: the Tribune prints a ballot. 171 people answer in a day. The council buys Kane and Gillette that night.
1941
October 1: bids are opened. The low bid is $46,950, by fifty dollars.
1941
November 12: footings are poured. The losing bidder sues to stop the work.
1941
December 7: Pearl Harbor. On December 22 and 23 the injunction case is tried.
1942
August 31, three in the afternoon: the doors open. Final cost $56,591.58.
The long version
Forty chapters, every one of them sourced to a dated article in the La Crosse Tribune.
Almost everything on this page came out of a newspaper. The 84 years after the doors opened did not get written down, and those are the years most people were actually there for.
This history draws on 55 articles published in the La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press between March 1937 and August 1942; a published history of the La Crosse Public Library held in the library's ResCarta repository; "130 Years of Library Service" by Anita Taylor Doering of the La Crosse Public Library Archives; the La Crosse Public Library's own records, La Crosse Series 008; the City of La Crosse Architectural & Engineering Analysis (April 2026); and the Wisconsin Historical Society's Architecture and History Inventory, record 34574, surveyed in 1999, 2016 and 2019.
Photographs of the building and its readers are courtesy of the La Crosse Public Library Archives & Local History Department. Newspaper clippings are reproduced via Newspapers.com. Photographs of the library's last day are by Doug Connell. Corrections are welcome and wanted.