Limestone walls and tall arched windows face you, completed in 1933 as Austin's Carnegie Library. Completed in 1933, it was built as Austin's Carnegie Library — one of more than 2,500 libraries funded worldwide by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who believed that public libraries were democracy's most essential institution. The Art Deco building is beautiful: limestone exterior, symmetrical façade, ornamental metalwork framing tall windows that flood the reading rooms with Texas light.
It served as Austin's main public library for nearly half a century before the city built a new central library in 2017 and repurposed this building as a dedicated archive for the city's historical collections. Inside are millions of documents, photographs, maps, oral history recordings, and artifacts spanning Austin's entire recorded history — from Spanish colonial land grants to real estate promotional materials from the 1920s boom to the photographs of Black Austin's segregated neighborhoods that document a world the rest of the city pretended didn't exist. The History Center's African American Community Archives and its Spanish-language collections represent a commitment to telling the city's story fully, including the chapters that powerful people preferred to skip.
Every city contains multitudes. This building holds Austin's.