LISSTEN library tours

Brenda Welch

On a warm September afternoon, Mechanics' Institute Library Director Inez Shor Cohen and I hosted a tour of the historic landmark building in downtown San Francisco. The Mechanics’ Institute was founded in 1854, shortly after the Gold Rush brought thousands of fortune seekers to the city of San Francisco. The Institute was established to promote the technical and scientific arts, with the goals of providing technical education and training for mechanics, a profession defined more broadly in the 19th century than now, to sponsor lectures on technical and cultural topics, and to promote local industry. From 1857 to 1899, the Mechanics’ Institute sponsored thirty-one industrial fairs, which included exhibits of agricultural products, manufactured goods, scientific apparatus, and art. The fairs, while providing entertainment for Victorian San Franciscans, also supported the economic development of California. In addition, one of the pavilions created for the fairs was used as a hospital for the wounded during the 1906 earthquake– until it, too, came within reach of the fire racing through the city.

The Library itself became a casualty of the earthquake and fire. The previous January, the largely technical collection of the Mechanics’ Institute, comprising 135,000 volumes, had merged with the humanities collection of the San Francisco Mercantile Library.  Just a few months later, the majority of both collections burned to the ground. Today, the Library, located on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the building, has moved away from collecting technical materials and instead houses a general-interest collection of almost 175,000 books, 500 periodical titles, 45 newspapers and 4,000 movies and audiobooks. The collection is especially strong in California history, business, finance, and investment, fiction and literature, and travel. The Library also provides reference services and research assistance, interlibrary loan, wireless Internet access, online databases, and multiple workshops and classes.

Another strong subject in the collection is chess. This is because the Mechanics’ Institute houses the oldest chess club in the United States. The Chess Room, located on the 4th floor, offers a variety of activities for players of all abilities – so feel free to drop in and try out your game! The Chess Room hosts tournaments, lectures, lessons, casual play, and special programs for children and women. If you sit down to play a casual game of chess at the Mechanics’, you never know if you’re facing a beginner or a Grandmaster.

Today, the Mechanics’ Institute is a nonprofit membership organization open to the public. Membership in the Mechanics’ Institute is open to all. If you were unable to attend the LISSTEN-hosted tour of the Mechanics’ Institute but would like to take a look around, please consider attending the weekly public tour, which is held every Wednesday at noon.

Mechanics’ Institute Library web site: http://www.milibrary.org/