Look up at the Phoenix Carnegie Library and Library Park, known today as the Carnegie Center. Feel the weight of a story that began not here, but in the spring of 1898, when the Friday Club collected books and secured two rooms on the second floor of the Fleming Block, then one of the largest office buildings in downtown Phoenix. The success of that modest collection led, the following spring, to the formation of the Phoenix Library Association and a move into a room in Phoenix City Hall — space made available when the legislative assembly relocated to the new capitol building.
Those early books were catalogued by the Dewey system for the first time in town. As demand grew, the Association sought a more permanent home and worked to transfer the project to the city; that transfer could not happen until March 1901, after an amendment to the territorial statutes, when the Phoenix Public Library was finally established. This building before you was completed in 1908 and later recognized nationally when it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Picture those early rooms in the Fleming Block as you look toward the building and park that grew from them.