A new iconic library helped the city become more beautiful on this week in Philly history

In the summer of 1926, Philly turned pretty.

The city’s new, Paris-inspired boulevard, its grand parkway, was unveiled to the world.

What we now call the Benjamin Franklin Parkway was to be the centerpiece of the city’s planned world’s fair for the country’s 150th anniversary. While that didn’t go quite as planned, the strip remained a crowning achievement of Philly’s facelift.

The City Beautiful movement had spread from city to city throughout the turn of the 20th century, demanding that polluted and overly industrialized cities soften their harsh landscapes and class up the joint for the people who live there.

» READ MORE: Philly kicked off its second (and less successful) world’s fair on this week in Philly history

The movement gifted the city the Parkway and the Art Museum and the Rodin. It also produced 30th Street Station and FDR Park.

And the public library system received its jewel box of a bookhouse on June 2, 1927.

The Beaux-Arts building opened on the Parkway between 19th and 20th Streets, framed by Logan Square.

The Inquirer reported that more than 2,000 people passed through on the first day.

Exercises were held on the grass plot across from its wrought-iron front gates (now a park), and stands had to be erected to contain the crowd.

George Wharton Pepper, former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and nephew of Free Library founder William Pepper, called it a public treasure house. Then-Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick celebrated its addition to the movement to make Philly pretty again.

The building, reinforced with steel and coated in marble, cost a whopping $7 million (or nearly $134 million today), and opened with more than one million books spread over 28 miles of shelves. (Today, a good portion of the collection is off-site.)

Its oversized windows welcomed light, and it featured a roof deck with tables and chairs.

Jane Jacobs, celebrated author and urban activist, only saw bad. She would later criticize the movement for its emphasis on adding a few grand and elaborate buildings instead of focusing on smaller additions that helped closer connect the environment with the people who use it.

Ninety-nine years later (we know, we’re a year early), it remains a space that, as Jacobs noted, stands alone more so than merging with its greater environment. But once inside, the beautiful French box and its high-end marble create an oasis that has long endured.

“To the book lover the building holds out a prospective paradise,” The Inquirer reported at the grand opening, “but the sheer beauty of the physical plant, both inside and out, are such that one who reads little or not at all will find much to enthral him without scanning a single title.”