by Susan Orlean
15.
the old L.A. Public Library burned
down
that library downtown
and with it went
a large part of my
youth.
. . . .
that wondrous place
the L.A. Public Library
Charles Bukowski, “The Burning of the Dream” Septuagenarian Stew (1990)
By Bukowski, Charles
818 B932–1
As soon as the fire was extinguished, the fire department began investigating. All three of the department’s arson teams were assigned to the case, and federal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents joined them. Several investigators went undercover at the library in case the arsonist returned. The rest canvassed the neighborhood, answered the tip line, followed leads, scoured for evidence.
The city publicized the search with billboards and radio spots. All hundred thousand municipal employees found notes in their pay envelopes asking for information and offering a thirty-thousand-dollar reward. More than four hundred people called or mailed in tips. Many of the tips were not useful. One repeated tip was the suggestion that Libyan agents might have set the fire because the relationship between Libya and the United States was so troubled. Other tips were more specific:
Sirs, the ARSONIST who burned your library is . . . Mr. Theadore V—of the X Porno Cinema . . . he is the #1 MAFIA DON in Massachusetts . . . he is also a Drug Kingpin and was pushing his drugs while in LA!
Dear Sirs, in regards to the arson at the library, consider [name redacted]. 1. This person has a mental problem . . . Ask a psychiatrist concerning this matter; he would diagnose that person as instantly insane.
Dear Sir, This man, Richard W—, may have set FIRE to your library. He thinks he is GOD-Realized. He was born an Aries. Admitted to rape with a motorcycle gang and may have murdered others. Last year I told him to go to HELL and stay away from me. He keeps harassing me to BE his devotee, because he’s very prejudiced. Because I’m Oriental. He told me I was a witch and had 3 months to live. If he . . . checks out books it would BE anything on GOD Realization, Buddhism, Zen Religion, or witchcraft. Perhaps he didn’t want to return any books. So he burnt the library because he was unable to check anything out.
The investigators learned that a well-known psychic in Los Angeles, Gary Bowman, had commented on the case. Bowman was seventy-five thousand years old and lived in a South American jungle with a herd of magical miniature horses while also managing to be a resident of Los Angeles. His spirit guide was John the Apostle. Somewhat jarringly, when John the Apostle spoke through Bowman, he had a strong Australian accent. Audiences embraced Bowman; his radio show, Out of the Ordinary Radio, had a wide audience. He was channeling John the Apostle when he commented on the library fire.
Questioner: Is it possible to name or identify the persons involved [with the library fire]?
Bowman (John the Apostle): We are not interested in doing this.
Questioner: Will there be further attempts to burn the library?
Bowman/John: Yes, within six months. There will be further attempts to burn the library—the old facility—within six months.
Audience (gasping): Why?!
Bowman/John: Because [the perpetrators] are stupid. Their motives are actually that they are angry . . . So they will take that which is of value to others and seek to deprive them of it because they feel that they are deprived. Do you understand that? And so it is that they lash out at . . . they will attempt it again in six months.
Arson is vexingly hard to investigate. Even the biggest fire can be started with a single match—a slender bit of evidence at best, which is likely to be consumed by what it has started. A fire can smolder slowly. The arsonist has plenty of time to walk away before anything seems amiss. The beginning of a fire can be nothing much—a twinkle of flame, a tendril of smoke. By the time it fully blooms, the arsonist can be far away. It is hard to imagine a more perfect crime than one in which the weapon disappears and the act itself can unfold almost unnoticeably. Of all major criminal offenses, arson is the least successfully prosecuted. The rate of conviction is less than one percent. An arsonist has a ninety-nine percent likelihood of getting away with the crime.
What made the library fire especially hard to investigate was that it occurred in a public space. Unless you borrow a book, your time in a library is unrecorded and anonymous. The fire at Central Library began an hour after opening. There were already two hundred patrons in the building, and there is no way to know how many other people came in and out before that. The library is open to everyone, which meant that everyone was a possible suspect. There was no means for investigators to narrow their search.
The arson squad hoped the library staff might have noticed someone acting out of turn that morning, which would at least give them somewhere to begin. A senior librarian mentioned that she had seen a young fair-haired stranger walk into the staff workroom that morning and pour himself a cup of coffee. The workroom was easy to access, but it is clearly not part of the department’s public space. The librarian had shooed him away. In another department, a young man—possibly the same young man—had been seen entering a restricted area. When the librarian on duty reprimanded him, the man had said he was a new employee and was taking a look at the stacks. The librarian sheepishly welcomed him to the staff and went back to work. Around the same time, a young man was seen in the History stacks, which are closed to everyone except staff. When the department librarian noticed him, she asked if he was an employee, and he answered that he was looking for a newspaper. He lingered for ten minutes and then abruptly turned and left. At the Hope Street entrance—which employees use before the library opens to the public—a young man who didn’t have an employee badge tried to walk in the door. The security guard on duty stopped him and explained that the library wasn’t open to the public yet. The man replied that he was looking for a telephone, and started to head inside. The guard grabbed his arm and repeated that he couldn’t come in. The young man angrily wrenched his arm out of the guard’s grasp, and then turned on his heel and left.
Such trespasses at the library were unusual but not remarkable. The young man eventually complied with every request to leave, so no one made any further note of it, or got his name, or called for additional security. Each incident lasted only an instant and didn’t make much of an impression. All the staff could recall was that the young man was of average size and weight and that he had blond hair brushed back off his forehead in soft wings. It was a description very similar to the one given by the elderly woman who had been knocked over by a man rushing to leave the library after the fire alarm sounded. Based on these descriptions, a sketch artist began working on a drawing. The result was a portrait of a man in his twenties with prominent wide-set eyes; a thick nose; a walrus mustache; and hair that looked like a shorter version of Farrah Fawcett’s on Charlie’s Angels.
Where was Harry Peak after April 29, 1986? As far as I can tell, he kept up his usual ambling ways, picking up odd jobs here and there, hanging out with friends, auditioning for roles, dreaming the dream. He ran errands for a lawyer named Leonard Martinet, who was based in San Francisco. Harry and Demitri Hioteles were no longer a couple by this time, but they remained friends. Hioteles operated a limousine service and sometimes hired Harry as a driver. As with anything that involved Harry, this patronage came at a cost. Once, Harry offered to change the oil on one of the limos. He drained the engine, and then, before putting in the new oil, he wandered off for a cigarette. Perhaps he then had another cigarette, or maybe he took a walk; in any case, he was gone for hours. In the meantime, another one of the drivers took the limo without realizing it had no oil. Within a few miles, the engine blew up. Hioteles told me this story with a deep sigh. “That was just Harry being Harry,” he said, “doing stupid things like that.”
On the day of the fire, Hioteles had been at the valet desk at the Sheraton, chatting with a friend. The phone rang. It was Harry, soundin
g giddy. He insisted that Hioteles guess where he’d spent the morning. Hioteles waited for him to unfurl one of his stories of how he had gone drinking with someone like Jack Nicholson or Nick Nolte. Instead, Harry exclaimed that he had been at the library fire. He chattered about how intense it had been, and how it had gotten so hot that a handsome fireman had to carry him out of the building. The story sounded almost believable, but it didn’t make sense. Hioteles couldn’t picture Harry at a library; he couldn’t recall ever seeing Harry read a book. Harry loved to insert himself into any public spectacle, so Hioteles let him spin the story for a while and then put it out of his mind, the way he did with so many of Harry’s tales.
Hearing the story out loud must have sparked something in Harry. Perhaps he found some pleasure in being listened to, some thrill in being a character in a dark drama. That night, he went back to Santa Fe Springs and got stoned and drunk with friends from high school. He told them about the fire; this time his story was a little grander. He said he’d been at the fire, and a handsome fireman had carried him out, and then added, off-handedly, that he had started the fire. It was boozy talk, easily dismissed, and his friends doubted him, but Harry insisted it was true. When he got back to Los Angeles, Harry told his roommates yet another version of the story. He said he had been at the library doing research for Martinet’s law firm, and after the fire had started, he’d helped an elderly lady escape through a window. Then a handsome fireman had carried him out of the building.
He kept repeating the story, adjusting it a touch each time, as if he were a tailor working on a jacket, taking in a bit of fabric here, letting out a seam there, then stepping back to consider what fit best. He told Dennis Vines that he had been at the library that morning because he was researching how to apply for a civil service job. Vines had never heard Harry talk about the library before. He figured it was just Harry puffing up, since he loved placing himself in the middle of anything eventful. Vines had developed a habit of fact-checking Harry, so he asked him details about the library—simple things, like where the entrance was. Harry had no idea. That convinced Vines that Harry was fibbing. He decided that Harry must have seen fire trucks downtown and decided it would make interesting conversation to say he was there.
Terry Depackh, one of the investigators of the library fire, told me not long ago that the case was unusually exasperating. The leads all fizzled; investigators didn’t have any useful evidence or eyewitnesses. Nor did they have a motive, although Depackh leaned toward the assumption that whoever had started it was probably “on the pyro side.” The librarians’ description of the coffeemaker trespasser was the only sighting of a potential suspect, but it wasn’t really useful. All the librarians could say with certainty was that someone had been seen somewhere he didn’t belong on the morning the fire began.
A month after the fire, a woman named Melissa Kim called the tip line and said that her brother’s roommate looked just like the man in the composite sketch. She also said that the roommate, Harry Peak, told her brother that he had been at the library at the time of the fire. She said Harry had recently applied for a job at the Santa Monica Fire Department but had failed the exam. Depackh thought the tip sounded interesting, and he passed it to Joe Napolitano, a retired investigator who was helping with the case. At first glance, Harry Peak didn’t look promising as a suspect. There was nothing connecting him to the library. He seemed like just another one of the thousands of young men who churn through Los Angeles, job-hopping, tumbling from one apartment to another, a little feckless and starry-eyed, lifted by the continuous supply of hope and sun. But Napolitano was intrigued by the fact that Harry had told someone he’d been at the library that day, as well as the fact that he had applied for work as a firefighter. As with Glendale’s notorious John Leonard Orr, firefighter arsonists do exist, and it is a stubborn and bewildering problem in the fire community. About one hundred of them are arrested every year, according to Firesetting Firefighters—The Arsonist in the Fire Department, published by the National Volunteer Fire Council in the 1990s. Although Harry wasn’t a firefighter, the tip suggested that he had expressed interest, and might have been driven to do something vindictive because he hadn’t been able to pass the exam. He also fit the profile of the typical firefighter arsonist, who is usually a white male between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five.
The arson squad decided to put Harry under surveillance. Harry noticed that he was being watched. Instead of being upset when he spotted the investigators sitting in a car outside his house, he chatted with them and brought them coffee and doughnuts. The situation must have felt unreal to him, a scene in a bizarre movie in which he was the star. It must have seemed like something he could charm his way out of, which he was good at doing.
Ten days after Melissa Kim called the tip line, her mother called Napolitano. First, she asked if the thirty-thousand-dollar reward was still being offered. When she was told it was, she said that she had visited her son recently and had seen Harry Peak, and she’d noticed that he had cut his hair and shaved his mustache, as if trying to change his appearance. She added that the day after she visited, Harry had called her, shouting “he was not a firebug” and that “just because he was in the library the day of the fire and looked like the composite didn’t mean he set the fire.”
Napolitano decided it was time to question Peak. He and Terry Depackh went to Peak’s house in Hollywood for the interview. Harry told them he was nervous, that he was worried that he was being viewed as a suspect. Depackh asked where he had been on the day of the fire, and Harry said he had been at the library. He said he had been downtown doing an errand for Martinet and was looking for a place to have breakfast. He’d seen the library and decided to go in because it was such a beautiful building. He had spent about a half hour walking around admiring it. Between ten and eleven A.M. he’d smelled smoke and heard someone yell “Fire.” In his rush to get out, he had bumped into an elderly woman but had stopped to help her up and then walked her out to the sidewalk. He said when he was outside, he saw a Superior Court judge whom he knew, and they stood together and watched the building burn.
After he finished, Harry told Depackh and Napolitano that he bet the person who started the fire hadn’t intended for it to get so big. The investigators took down his statement and noted the discrepancies. No one had smelled smoke when the fire began because there was no smoke for at least a half hour after the alarm, and no one had yelled “Fire” because there’d been no visible fire until the building was evacuated. Depackh then asked Harry if he had recently cut his hair and mustache. Harry hesitated. He was someone who preened and fussed over how he looked, and took special pride in his blond hair, but he told the investigators that he simply couldn’t remember.
16.
Hollywood Babylon (1975)
By Anger, Kenneth
812.09 A587
How to Draw Buildings (2006)
By Beasant, Pam
X 741 B368
In Commemoration of the Greatest Engineering Triumph of the Ages and Most Wonderful Accomplishment of Human Endeavor in All History: The Building of the Panama Canal, the San Diego Panama-California Exposition Opens Wide Its Portals and Invites the World (1915)
Folio 917.941 S218-4
God’s Drum and Other Cycles from Indian Lore: Poems by Hartley Alexander (1927)
By Alexander, Hartley Burr
811 A376
After Charles Lummis was pushed out of his library job, the Human Encyclopedia made an unsuccessful pitch for the position. The board instead opted for a quiet, tender-faced librarian from Missouri named Purd Wright, who tidied up the wreckage left in Lummis’s wake and then resigned after just eight months for a job at the library in Kansas City. His successor, who stayed in the post over twenty years, was Everett Robbins Perry, the head of the Astor Library in New York City. Perry was a small man with an imposing forehead and a penetrating gaze whose idea of leisure wear was a three-button suit and a four-in-hand tie. He was as impert
urbable as Lummis had been tempestuous. “He is all business,” the board noted after Perry’s interview. “Listens well; doesn’t talk much . . . the granite of old New England was in his foundations; imagination and creative spirit were not in his make-up.” The board suspected that Perry had “no genius” for friendship and barely any inner emotional life but felt he would make an excellent city librarian. In fact, Perry was passionate, but his passion was exclusively for libraries, and he judged people by whether or not they shared his passion. The staff of the Los Angeles library adored him. They called him Father Perry.
By then, the city was a throbbing, thriving place, growing so fast that it erased and rewrote itself by the minute. The Southern California oil industry literally erupted in 1903 and soon led the country. The film industry began in 1910 with the production of D. W. Griffith’s movie In Old California and grew by bounds. The city was a jumble, a mingle of roughnecks, starlets, immigrants, grifters, typists, cowboys, screenwriters, longshoremen, and ranch families, all streaming in, staking out a corner, mustering a livelihood or not, joining the fray. The expansion of the city was so rapid that it was unnerving. It had a quality of metastasis. The sunniness and vitality were ratcheted up so high that it had an undercurrent of weirdness, of something careening out of control. Even gleaming, glossy Hollywood had an undercoat of drug addiction, alcoholism, sex scandals, murders. A sense of desperation and solitude was welded to it. In 1920, former Ziegfield girl Olive Thomas, who was married to actress Mary Pickford’s brother Jack, died after overdosing on her husband’s syphilis medication. In 1921, actor Fatty Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of an aspiring actress named Virginia Rappe, who had been drunk and injecting morphine at the time of her murder. The following year, director William Desmond Taylor was found dead with a gunshot wound in his back.
