September 1937 — By morning the money was gone

The council committees met on the evening of Wednesday, September 8. That same week, another Common Council committee had gone to Milwaukee to sit with the Public Works Administration about the city's swimming pool. They came home with two answers. The pool had a schedule — one pool, finished by the fifteenth of May. And the federal money for school and public buildings was exhausted.

Which meant that the plans the council had just ordered drawn would have to be paid for some other way. On Friday morning the Tribune's editorial page laid the problem out under a headline that was really an instruction.

"Few projects ever undertaken publicly are so heavily endorsed as the records show in this case."

— The La Crosse Tribune, September 10, 1937

The editorial called it emergency construction. It pointed back at A. H. Sanford's forty percent — when that many citizens have library cards, the way forward for the Common Council is easy. It urged that the case be made again before winter, when students fill the branches. And it ended with a piece of practical advice: send the council committee back to the Milwaukee office, and this time take the library trustees along, so the men who had called the branches unsanitary could say it in person.

The headline was "Worth Trying For."

Four months later the city's new-year building outlook ran in the Tribune. Alongside the school additions, it noted, La Crosse was "faced with the building of branch libraries." The library board had asked during 1937 for funds to replace the quarters at Caledonia and Logan streets and at the West Avenue playfield. The council had asked the board, in return, for tentative plans and estimates.

"which to date has not been done"

— The La Crosse Tribune, January 2, 1938

Nothing had been drawn. With the federal money gone there was nothing to draw them for. The north side, which had just spent a year getting the council to say yes, began 1938 exactly where it had begun 1937.