March 1937 — Four days in March
By the spring of 1937 the library board had asked four times in four years. What happened next took four days.
Thursday, March 25 — the board asks again
The board requested that the City add a $40,000 north side library to the projects it was submitting to the federal government. "This is the fourth time since July, 1933, that the board has asked for branch library buildings," said Lilly M. E. Borresen, head of the central library staff. She put the case in one line.
"What was good enough 30 years ago with a circulation of 14,000 is not good enough for a circulation of nearly 90,000."
— Lilly M. E. Borresen, head of the central library staff, March 25, 1937
Sunday, March 28 — the neighbors
That Sunday the Tribune went out and asked people who used the branch. A grocer, a nurse, a dentist, a lumber dealer, two teachers, a college student and a high school senior. They were unanimous.
"It is all right just to get books and leave, but it is such an unattractive place that people don't care to stay there and read."
— Melvin Lokken, grocer, 1300 Caledonia Street, March 28, 1937
"I think that a library on the North Side should have three rooms: one for small children, one for high school students, and one for adults. We need a better library badly, and have needed one for 10 or 15 years."
— Esther Willard, nurse, 1417 Charles Street, March 28, 1937
Dr. H. W. Hunt, a dentist, worried about the children: "They have to sit around the stoves, get too warm, and then catch colds when they go outdoors." Professor Hayden, who had chased the federal money four years earlier, was blunter: "The present library has done very good work, but we have outgrown it." And somebody made the comparison that must have stung — North La Crosse had around eleven thousand residents against Sparta's five thousand, "and yet Sparta has a library that is superior by far to what we have here on the North Side."
Monday, March 29 — the paper comes out for it
The next morning the Tribune backed them on its editorial page, and named the problem exactly.
"the lighting, ventilating and over-crowded condition of north branch is such as to make its operation merely a station for the circulation of books, uninviting and totally inadequate in every respect for work within the building"
— The La Crosse Tribune, editorial, March 29, 1937
A station for the circulation of books. Somewhere you collect and leave. The editorial closed: "Few WPA projects, if any, contemplated by the city at this time would reflect to greater advantage of more people than a new north public library branch."