This regular meeting of the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday, February 17, 2026, addressed a range of legislative items, including tenant protections against extreme heat, police oversight, fire hazard clearance, and consent calendar approvals. The meeting began with ceremonial presentations for Engineers Week and Lunar New Year, followed by public comment and discussion on several key motions.
Inserted in between the pages, sketches from famed costume designer Adrian, movie posters, lobby cards. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce donated its Hollywood Christmas Parade archive. In 1983, when the original model for the library was unveiled, Goldwyn said that he and Gary were criticized for its design. People said that it didn't look like what a library was supposed to look like, he said. Have four rather solid walls, be dark, and have Shakespeare and Plato on the wall. That's good too, but this is different. I hope people will come and look at it and want to come in and read a book. The Frank Gary designed Hollywood Library opened on June 12th, 1986, more than four years after the fire. Kirk Douglas cut the ribbon while teary-eyed Hollywood staff members looked on. Staff members from Central Library were also on hand because just two months earlier, the Central Library had also burned. In fact, lessons learned in the aftermath of the Hollywood Library Fire about salvaging books and handling donations would prove to be invaluable in shaping the response to the Central Library fire. This amazing collection is still accessible to the public by making an appointment at the Hollywood Library. Challenge yourself to conserve. Turning off the faucet when you brush saves up to 10 gallons of water. Taking a five-minute or less shower saves up to 15 gallons of water. Washing only full loads of laundry saves up to 30 gallons of water. And fixing a running toilet can save up to 50 gallons of water. Keep it in mind all day, every day. It's water conservation the LA way. Welcome to the Los Angeles Central Library, a cultural gem at the heart of downtown Los Angeles, and the flagship of the Los Angeles public library system. For the last century, this remarkable institution has been a beacon of learning, creativity, and community for Angelinos and visitors alike. Every day, the Central Library connects people, providing a vital space to engage in the present. Learn from the past and dream of the future. Whether you're visiting the city or viewing from home, welcome to LA this week. Opened in 1926, the Los Angeles Central Library is an architectural landmark inspired by ancient civilizations and Spanish colonial revival styles. By the mid-1960s, the building faced calls for demolition, but preservation efforts prevailed. A major renovation saved the library, doubled its size, and introduced new landscaping. Now in 2026, LA's public library invites everyone to celebrate 100 years of the Central Library and its lasting impact on the city. We are in the magnificent Central Library here in downtown Los Angeles, and we are celebrating the 100th birthday of this incredible building. Just as importantly, all of the incredible things that happened inside it and have happened over the last 100 years. And we're going to be revealing what we found in that copper box. Yeah, it was not a simple or straightforward process to figure out how we were going to get the actual time capsule out of the middle of our wall from a hundred years ago. There were structural integrity concerns, there were historic resource concerns. The actual cornerstone itself is beautifully inscribed with the name and the seal of the library, and we couldn't damage or destroy that. So long story short, we were able to come through the inside of the building, which happens to be the men's restroom, bust through the inside layer of the outer wall and the cornerstone itself to finally reach the capsule and pull it out and uh be able to finally open it and share the contents today. I would just encourage people to come down and see it. The time capsule especially is kind of fun because as kids we used to do time capsules in our backyard. No one probably ever dug them up, but in this case, you know, it was a very formal thing, and they even found a time capsule inside of Time Capsule, which was cool, so you can see all the contents of that. It's neat. There were some things that we knew had been placed in the time capsule through minutes of library board meetings. But as with almost all time capsules, there are inevitably surprises. Another really interesting thing to me was from the 1881 time capsule from the normal school that was on this site before the library, and that capsule was actually inside of ours. We didn't have any idea what that was going to contain, but among the really interesting things was a sort of memento of uh black morning cloth and dried moss from the funeral of President Garfield who had been assassinated just a couple months prior, and somebody who was at that memorial celebration in uh Cleveland brought that and felt that it was important to represent that moment in American history and put it in the time capsule, and that's something we have here that we never would have expected. I've walked around and looked at the artifacts, which is amazing how well they survived. They don't look like they sat in the box for a hundred years. But the building itself proved that LA does have a history. We are not just this whole new city. We do have a history here, and we like to celebrate our history. A lot of great things to be proud of of this library. I think it's the greatest place where any Angelino can come and feel at home, read, and just feel at peace, knowing that they can have access to any great knowledge as I have.