fuego6:
It’s very difficult, not impossible, but takes extraordinary re-engineering.
Look at the picture of the pages; that child labor was used to fetch books for patrons.
Libraries aren’t, and never were, simply reading rooms, those rooms being easy enough to create in older spaces. It’s a classic mistake to assume the public features of a building are its whole function.
Perhaps with hundreds of millions of dollars a robot able to retrieve books from the stacks could be built into an old opera house in 2014, but not in the 1950s.
The old opera house makes for nice photos, but I see why it’s continued use as a library was considered a problem. (Now if you’re saying they could have used the entire opera as the reading space and built separate, but easily accessible stacks, that’s possible, but I don’t know the situation in Cincinnati in the 1950s.)
So no.
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.