Really. It's not a monster. It's just a library. A very large library. With over 4.5 million volumes spread across seven floors and over 570,000 square feet, employing 33 subject specialist librarians, focusing on the humanities and social sciences, with a bit of business and divinity thrown in for good measure.

Old Joe Regenstein was a life-long resident of the city of Chicago and a major industrialist who made his fortunes in the paper, plastic and chemical fields. After his death in 1957, his foundation donated $10,000,000 toward a new graduate research library.  After the groundbreaking in 1967, the library was completed and dedicated in 1970. The library actually was built on the site of the original Stagg Field, the University's athletic field from 1892 to 1967. It's also the spot where Enrico Fermi and his Big Bang Theory type buddies achieved man's first controlled, self-sustaining, nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. Whence sprang the atomic bomb and the Oppenheimer quote... "I am become Death... the destroyer of worlds." And to think it all began in a squash court. (There's a classic bronze Henry Moore sculpture called—what else?—"Nuclear Energy" plunked down on the western edge of the 12-acre site. Depending on your angle of viewing, it resembles a mushroom cloud or a misshapen skull, both of which are totally apropos.)

Libraries are the hot, burning center of any educational universe. Or they should be. Student life in elementary school should include joyous trips to the library media center (or whatever it's called at each particular school --- you name it, I've heard it: LRC (Learning Resource Center), LMC (Library Media Center), IRC (Instructional Resource Center), LLC (Library Learning Center). See what word all those appellations have in common? Yep, that's right: center with a capital "C," mind you, and that rhymes with "e" and that stands for... you get the picture.

Now granted, middle schoolers and high school students may not celebrate trips to the school library with as much enthusiasm as the wee ones, but still, they generally have a sense that it's a place to chill, eat lunch far from the madding crowd (if they have a cool librarian), Google some trivia (if they are smartphone-less), catch a quick nap (if the chairs are comfy -- or even if they're not) and generally just "be."

And by the time students get to college, the library, even more so than their dorm rooms, becomes their home away from home. (Well, at least that's what their parents hope!)

The above roughly (or smoothly) translates as “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.”  It is the motto of the University of Chicago, my alma mater (though how kind and nourishing this mother was is questionable... but that's a topic for a different blog).

Considering I was the girl who wanted to go places, I didn't go too far, just to Hyde Park, still on the south side of Chicago, the location of said university. My time there was a tale of two libraries...

Ahhhh...

it was the best of times, the age of wisdom, the epoch of belief, the season of light and the spring of hope...

this was not just a library...

more a cathedral of knowledge, from its Gothic spires to its arched stained glass windows.

I could barely resist the urge to genuflect every time I passed through its heavy oak doors.

And then there were the gargoyles....

Truly badass gargoyles!

Oh, it had books, too. And a wonderful old smell and weight to the air inside, as if it held all the knowledge and wisdom of centuries past that scholars had struggled to bring forth with sweat and tears and migraine headaches and just taking in a deep breath would convey all that inside of me.

I didn't have to close my eyes to imagine I was somewhere else. I WAS somewhere else... a place of elegance and refinement...

And a place where EVERYONE was different... not just me.

And then there was the other one...

the worst of times, the age of foolishness, the epoch of incredulity, the season of darkness and the winter of despair... Regenstein.

In my mind, it is no coincidence that Regenstein rhymes (sort of...) with Frankenstein. The place was a man-made monster that choked the life out of me. There were no deep breaths to take in Regenstein...

Literally...

I couldn't breath under the oppressive glare and constant hum of its fluorescent lights and ventilation system. I didn't care if it was constructed of grooved limestone. I t had the look of plug-ugly cement. I didn't care if the façade marginally resembled the fore edges of books (the sides opposite the spines). Half an hour in its cold sterile embrace and I'd be scuttling for the doors, like the cockroaches in the basement of Woodward Hall when startled by the sudden flick of a light switch.

Luckily, unlike those locked up in the facility on the right in the image below, I was free to leave.

But the worst thing about Regenstein?




NO GARGOYLES!!!!!

But I must confess, there is one good memory I have of an adventure in that library. I remember kissing a slender blonde boy in the stacks where the music scores were stored. No one went in there. After all, U of C was the place where fun went to die. No one had time to practice his or her instrument... or those students who were musically inclined were so incredibly bright and talented that they had every single note of every piece of music they could possibly care to play already memorized. Or so we thought.

It was a little awkward at first because he wore glasses, so he finally took them off and then forgot them on the shelf. (Did he wind up as an absent-minded professor?) Later, when we went back to retrieve them, they were GONE! To this day, I have no idea if someone else, a saxophone player, perhaps, was in there with us, sharing our little adventure. This was, of course, back in the day, before the dawn of the ubiquitous security camera. Young lovers beware!

Unlike Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, I survived my tale of two libraries and recently returned to my old haunts to see how the years have treated them....

but that's a tale for another post...