William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

A small fire is said to have broken out in nineteen twenty-three at the Los Angeles home of philanthropist William Andrews Clark Junior, the copper-fortune heir whose father had once been a US Senator from Montana. Clark was not hurt, but he looked at his growing collection of rare books and manuscripts and decided that was enough. He commissioned architect Robert Farquhar to design a fireproof Beaux-Arts library on a landscaped square-block site in the West Adams neighborhood.

Built between nineteen twenty-four and nineteen twenty-six, the Clark Library holds some of the finest collections of seventeenth and eighteenth century English literature in the world, with a particular focus on Oscar Wilde and his circle. Clark gave the building and its contents to UCLA, and it still operates today as a scholars' library, one of the rare research gems hidden in a Los Angeles residential neighborhood.