Today I visited the Main Library in Oak Park, Illinois. Thanks to @ebattaglia from the IT department for the tour, and thanks to @showsomemoxie for setting it up.

The Oak Park Main Library is a huge new building: 104,000 square feet and 3 floors.  There are two other branch libraries that I didn’t get to, the Dole Library and the Maze Branch.

The thing that really caught my eye about this library was the art collection and their attention to the furniture in the building.  This should not really come as a surprise, since Oak Park is “home to the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings and houses, with 25 structures built between 1889 and 1913“.  Also noteworthy is the fact that our old boy Ernest Hemingway came from this town, and the Oak Park Library collects materials about him.  Unrelated decorative arts note: check out the bathroom tiles in Hemingway’s house on Key West.  Beautiful.

My favorite pieces in the Oak Park Library’s art collection were the Chris Ware drawings (1) (2) (3) and best of all the two wonderful pieces of Higgins Art Glass.  As a Mid-Century design geek and collector of cool looking stuff, I’ve always coveted Higgins glass mobiles and I couldn’t believe this lucky library patron just chilling out underneath one.  Jealous.

Also, all art and greenroof projects aside, it should be clear that there’s some excpetional librarianship going on around here, as the Genre-X programs that I’ve written about before come out of this place.

Stick with the PLA Blog, I visited another great library in the Chicago area today and you’ll be able to read about it soon.