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Attempts to have a library in Beach Haven had begun as early as the
1880’s with a gift of books for the town’s children by Dr. Edward
Williams who, along with Charles Parry of the Parry House and the
Baldwin Hotel, was a partner in the Baldwin Locomotive Works. The
collection was kept in the home of Samuel Copperthwaite on Engleside
Avenue, and eventually in one of the Sunday school rooms of the Kynett
ME Church, which had been built in 1890. After the old Quaker Meeting
House had been given to the town by Walter Pharo, the Reverend Alexander
Corson of the Methodist Church undertook, with his bride, to make it
into a viable library and by the time they left in 1908 it was well on
its way.
 In 1923 Mrs. Walter Pharo, in memory of her husband’s parents, Archelaus
Ridgway Pharo
and Louisa Willits Pharo - the founders of Beach Haven, and of her late
husband Walter, presented the board of the library with a proposal to
build, entirely at her own expense, a new library for the town
two blocks away from the church on a corner lot owned by her at Third
and Beach. It was accepted immediately. R. Brognard Okie, one of
Philadelphia’s finest architects, was contacted by Mrs. Pharo. He chose
as his model a Pennsylvania farm house - not an early lifesaving station
as has often been said. Unlike the traditional farm house, however, it
would be made entirely of brick and steel with several non-traditional
features like three working fireplaces, a vaulted ceiling and an
interior balcony encircling the first floor.
Tons of
concrete were poured and steel girders of the new, two story structure
were already up by the spring of 1924 on the SE corner of Beach Avenue
at Third Street. Okie moved to Beach Haven and supervised every step of
the construction, which was all done by the local builder Floyd
Cranmer. Ten railcar loads of bricks were used to build the solid outer
walls and it was soon evident that the town was to have the finest
library on the coast of New Jersey.
As it
neared completion in the late fall of 1924, the durable beauty of the
new library at Third Street and Beach Avenue in Beach Haven was already
drawing praise. To offset the whiteness of the walls, all the windows
were hung with long shutters of pale green. A sweeping, multi-dormered,
black roof added a grace seldom seen in a public building. Surrounded
by a low, white picket fence and later, a well kept, green lawn it added
an incomparable dignity to what, in that time period, was the town’s
main street, Beach Avenue.
At the
formal opening on the 29th of November, 1924 it was evident
that no expense had been spared with the design of the first level
either. The red bricks laid in a floor supported by great steel beams
had come originally from England to Philadelphia as ship’s ballast,
their value further enhanced by having been a part of that city’s
historic St. John’s Church which, despite protests, had to be demolished
in 1923 to make room for the massive west band supports of the new
Benjamin Franklin Bridge across the Delaware.
From
the main room on the first floor, the great vault of a cathedral ceiling
rises fully forty feet diffusing reflected sunlight downward without a
glare. To the left of the main room is a spacious alcove along the
north wall. Today it houses the children’s collection but seventy years
ago, a sign above the door read: “For Women Only.” It was a place for
the ladies to browse for their favorite books and magazines. It opened
out onto an airy, screened porch filled with comfortable wicker rockers
for reading on summer afternoons. The other alcove on the opposite side
of the building, now used as a library office, was the original
children’s room.
There
are two big, colonial style, working fireplaces on the first floor. One
is in the main room and the other is behind it in the long back room on
the ocean side of the library. Today this room houses the reference
collection and its solid, ten foot table makes it useful as a meeting
room. In the early years, it served a different function. It was the
men’s reading room where male patrons could sit in large comfortable
chairs to read magazines and newspapers. It was well lit by two tall
French windows and it, too, opened out onto the screened porch on the
north side.
The
main reading room with its vaulted ceiling is encircled with a balcony
reached by a spiral stone staircase using thick slabs of slate for
steps. The balcony flooring is of oak as are all of the spindles in the
railing. The walls upstairs are also lined with books. One great
window on the west side rises ten feet to the ceiling. The rest are all
set into dormers. On the east wall behind the upstairs balcony there is
a door where one may step down into a well furnished little museum with
high, beamed ceilings and a huge, stone fireplace. It is filled with
old hotel registers, deeds, diaries, photographs and other relics of
Beach Haven’s century and more of history.
The
Beach Haven Free Public Library is a prime architectural treasure on
Long Beach Island and a direct link to a colorful past that is the
town’s most precious heritage. Mrs. Elizabeth Pharo’s gift to the town,
more than seventy years old now, looks as new as the day it was built.
The taxpayers who support it are proud of its status as the only
independent library in Ocean County and have chosen to keep it that way. |
