Denver Public Library

The Denver Public Library is the public library system of the City and County of Denver, Colorado. The system includes the Denver Central Library, located in the Golden Triangle district of Downtown Denver, as well as 25 branch locations and two bookmobiles. The library's collection totals more than 2 million items, including books, reference materials, movies, music, and photographs. Of that total, more than 347,000 items are in specific collections including the Western History and Genealogy Department, Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library, and Reference Department holdings. History The Library's humble beginnings started in 1859 as an outdoor facility built from a carpenter's bench under a tree. It was founded by Arthur Pierce, one of the pioneers during the gold rush era. The library later evolved from the 1878 donation of books to the city's board of education, which were then maintained in a wing of East Denver High School. John Cotton Dana was named chief librarian and the "Denver Public Library" was officially established in 1889. The library moved into its own building in 1910, a Greek revival design funded by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie that was located in Civic Center Park downtown. (The 1910 building was repurposed to serve the Board of Water Commissioners for many years, and survives as McNichols Civic Center Building, in the Civic Center Historic District (Denver, Colorado).) Between 1913 and 1920, Carnegie also underwrote construction of the library's first eight branches. Previously the city relied on traveling trunks of books. Central Library In the 1950s the city commissioned the architectural firm Fisher & Fisher and designer Burnham Hoyt to build a new Central Library to be located on Broadway and West 14th Avenue. The property had previously been an auto dealership for the Ford Model T, Model A, and Model B before being condemned by the City in 1953. The Fisher/Hoyt Central Library in the city's Golden Triangle opened in 1956 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. As part of the dedication of the new library when it opened, Yale Library loaned a collection of books that included the 1455 Gutenberg Bible and 1640 Bay Psalm Book that are both rare and valuable artifacts. Throughout the 1950s and 1970s, Denver experienced an explosion of growth and quickly required more branches to be open to serve the new neighborhoods that branched out to the southeast and southwest.