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| Ladies Library Association: 333 S. Park
The following material is from the 1973 Initial Inventory of Historic Sites and Buildings in Kalamazoo and was made available for use here by the Historic Preservation Coordinator of the City of Kalamazoo. See Introduction to an Initial Inventory... for details about how the survey was conducted.
333 S. Park C-4 Location:
333 S. Park The
Kalamazoo Ladies Library Association was the first woman's club
organized in Michigan and the third in the nation. Members held
meetings in various places around the village between 1852 and 1879,
when local builder Fred Bush completed the present LLA building.
Built and furnished at a cost of $14,000 (and paid in full by 1883),
this was the first building erected as a woman's club in the
country. It is now recorded both as a state historic site and also
as a National Historic Landmark. Ruth
Webster, twenty-four years a treasurer and fifteen a librarian for
the LLA, provided the lot, and the association in turn commissioned
a stained glass memorial window in her honor. Chicago architect H.
W. Gay earned $75.00 for his set of plans in the then-fashionable
"Venetian Gothic" style. The exterior of the building
still retains something of the colorful effect of its original
patterns of brick and tile and stone. Beyond
a tiled entryway patterned after Charles Eastlake's popular Hints
on Household Taste, is the library itself. Many of the original
pieces of furniture remain, such as a fine bookshelf donated by Gazette
editor Volney Hascall. Lucinda Hinsdale Stone, a local educator and
world traveler, selected the paintings which still hang on the
walls. She chose copies of European artists for the most part, whose
works would have an uplifting effect on the local membership.
Stained glass windows dominate the room. Upstairs is a thirty by
sixty foot meeting hall and stage. Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Sill donated
the cane-seated "Eastlake" auditorium chairs, still in
original condition, in 1883. The Steinway grand piano came to the
LLA from Mrs. E. M. Walker, of Chicago. This
site has been a Kalamazoo landmark for many years. Many of the
town's most prominent citizens are identified with its history. It
deserves preservation as a notable link with the local past in
addition to its importance at the state and national level.
This report was converted from a typewritten document to a digital text document in September 2004. Other than punctuation and spelling corrections, and the addition of BOLD type site address and names, no changes were made. Minor formatting changes were made for use on this website, but the text was not altered. Original survey dated 1973.
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