1942 — They built it anyway

Construction began under the assumption that it might not finish. Steel and slate had already gone out of the specification before a shovel went in the ground; materials were being pulled into the war effort; the federal government had spent the autumn deciding whether La Crosse could build at all. The project could have stopped at any point.

The first sign that it had not comes from the council proceedings of February 1942, printed in the paper in agate between one routine item and the next.

Resolution accepting bid of Newton-Hoit Furniture Co. for furnishing library equipment for North Side branch library. — Proceedings of the Common Council, The La Crosse Tribune, February 21, 1942

Newton and Hoyt of Chicago had bid $1,927.45 for the equipment on the first of October, against Remington-Rand's $2,369.26: a U-shaped desk and the rest of the furniture. Four and a half months later, with the country at war, the city bought the furniture.

You do not buy the chairs for a building you expect to be stopped.

And then, three months later, two more lines in the same small type.

Resolution granting change orders on construction of North Side Branch Library.

Resolution extending time limit for construction of North Side Branch Library.

— Proceedings of the Common Council, The La Crosse Tribune, May 22, 1942

Change orders, and more time. That is what building under a war looks like in the official record: not a crisis, not a halt, just a city altering its plans and granting its contractor longer, in two sentences, between a resolution about depositories for city funds and an ordinance that was not adopted.

Steel had become wood and slate had become asphalt before the first shovel went in. By May 1942 something else had changed, and the building was late. The council minutes never say what. The library's own later account of the period does: linoleum requisitioned for battleships, electrical fixtures in short supply, and labor drawn off to Camp McCoy.

Read that list against October 1941 and it closes a loop nobody at the time could have seen. The linoleum alternate is what moved Peter Nelson and Son from fifty dollars high to seventy-five dollars low and won them the contract. Within months the same material was going into warships.