October 1941 — A fair sized club room

The bids were opened at City Hall on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 1, 1941. The next morning the Tribune printed the building.

An artist's sketch, across six columns: a long low building with a steep roof and tall chimneys, trees at the edges, two small figures on the path. It was planned by the architectural firm of Nelson and Fuchs from designs supplied by the library board of trustees.

It would be T-shaped, eighty feet by eighty overall, with brick and tile walls and a single sloping roof — chosen, the caption said, to correspond with the residential neighborhood in which it stood. The top of the T would run parallel to Gillette Street. The main entrance would open onto Kane.

On the main floor: a juvenile room, an adult room, a general reading room, a reference room, a quiet room, a stack room, a work room and a staff room. In the basement, the furnace and fuel rooms, a book storage room — and one thing more.

"a fair sized club room for meetings of women's reading circles and other such groups"

— The La Crosse Tribune, October 2, 1941, describing the basement of the new north side branch library

The building we are raising three million dollars to turn into a gathering place was designed with a gathering place in the basement. In 1941. Before anybody called it a third place.

The bids themselves were good news. Three La Crosse contractors had bid on the general contract and the range was narrow: $46,950 at the low end, $48,994 at the high. The whole project looked likely to come in under the $55,000 allotted to it. Nelson and Fuchs, supervising the job, noted that the figures were about ten percent above the bids taken three years earlier under the PWA — the grant that never came.

A. Schawlbe took the general contract with $46,950.

It was fifty dollars lower than the bid from Peter Nelson and Son.

Four alternates had been offered at the library board's request, and they are the war arriving in the specification: a wood floor instead of concrete, wood windows instead of steel, linoleum instead of cork carpet, asphalt shingles instead of slate. Several aldermen had already said they favored the wood windows, and a preference for the asphalt shingles had been expressed before the bids were even opened. Steel and slate were going elsewhere.

On the equipment contract — a U-shaped desk and the rest of the furniture — Newton and Hoyt of Chicago bid $1,927.45 against Remington-Rand's $2,369.26.

And the city had already spent five thousand dollars on a corner at Gillette and Kane.