Suzzallo and Allen Libraries

This guide to the Suzzallo and Allen Libraries in Seattle starts with a plan that never fully happened: architects Charles Bebb and Carl Gould's nineteen-tens design for three Gothic buildings around a three-hundred-foot bell tower, of which only one corner ever got built. It follows university president Henry Suzzallo, who pushed for a campus that felt like a medieval seat of learning and saw the library's first phase open in nineteen twenty-six, and his clash with Governor Roland Hartley over an eight-hour workday. Above the entrance, eighteen carved scholars still keep watch, among them Moses, Plato, Shakespeare and Newton. Look above nearby Smith Hall's northeast door for a small terra cotta carving of the tower that was never built.