After some well-deserved rest and relaxation with her husband, attorney Phil Corboy, Mary Dempsey is back in the book biz, after serving for the last eight months as the interim head of the city’s Procurement Services Department.
She has returned to the job that she adored for–can it really be this long?–11 years. As Chicago Public Library commissioner, she has overseen multimillion-dollar investments that have resulted in the opening of modern new branches and the renovations of old ones, the introduction of computers and other technological updates, and the creation of the “One Book, One Chicago” program.
Many of us have all but abandoned libraries for the Internet, given up card catalogues for Google, books for blogs. But there are wonders in all of the 81 libraries in the city system and Osgood and I happily direct you to one of its jewels, the Blackstone Library at 4904 S. Lake Park Ave.
It is the city’s first branch library and its oldest, built in 1904 with money donated by Isabella Norton Blackstone in honor of her late husband, Timothy Beach Blackstone, a railroad executive and the first president of the Union Stockyards, who had died four years earlier.
The building, impressive as any in the city, was the work of architect Solon S. Berman, who designed much of Pullman, the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, a few Hyde Park homes and a couple of buildings for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.
He created a beautiful library, modeled on the Erechtheum, a temple on the Acropolis in Athens. It has solid bronze doors; a central rotunda supported by eight marble columns and graced with four large murals by O.D. Grover depicting “Literature, “Science,” “Art” and “Labor”; and a main reading room whose high ceiling features a leaded-glass skylight.
No wonder branch manager Anne Keough (in Osgood’s photo, walking up to the stairs to the glass-paneled second floor) is proud of the building.
The place would be worth seeing even if it was empty. But it’s not. There are more than 36,000 books on hand. Go check one out.
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rkogan@tribune.com
