Wisconsin house that was once a Carnegie Library listed at $375K in Superior

With its stately Georgian Revival architecture, tall arched windows and ivy-covered brick walls, the exterior of the house in Superior, Wis., still looks like a Carnegie Library.

It was one of the nearly 1,700 libraries built across the country around the turn of the 20th century, using donations from steel tycoon and Gilded Age philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

But this particular building hasn’t been a book-lending site since 1991, when Superior opened a new public library and closed this 1917 East End library alongside another 1901-built Carnegie Library in a different part of the city.

A couple paid $17,000 for it the following year — less than what the library cost to build 75 years earlier, noted Teddie Meronek, a retired Superior librarian who worked in the East End library from 1981-91.

Those buyers converted the 2,376-square-foot building into a two-bedroom, two-bath residence and lived in it before selling to Matt Nagel five years ago.

Initially planning to convert the building into an Airbnb, Nagel has been working on upgrades since then. But many projects have turned out to be bigger and costlier than he’d expected.

Nagel, 32, has decided to devote his time to traveling instead and has listed the home at $375,000.

The city of Superior originally received $70,000 to build the two libraries, out of a total $56 million (more than a billion when adjusted for inflation) Carnegie donated for libraries in the country.

Carnegie’s libraries were a major part of the “Great American Library Movement” of that era, said Celeste Ford of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Before that, she said, there was no widespread public funding via taxes for libraries.

Superior did have a library as early as 1869, two decades before it became a city, Meronek said. But early libraries like that were typically located in a small room and privately funded.

Carnegie’s money built 63 libraries in Wisconsin and 66 in Minnesota. The council doesn’t know exactly how many are still functioning as libraries, though it does maintain a map and list of all of them.

“Many have been repurposed into museums, community centers, offices, event venues and, more rarely, private homes. But there’s no comprehensive record of how many fall into each category,” said Angely Montilla, also of the Carnegie foundation.

Nagel’s home still holds signs of library grandeur: a striking vestibule, gleaming wood floors, 14-foot ceilings on the main floor and 10-foot ceilings on the lower level. The windows around a large room that occupies much of the main floor are also 6 to 8 feet tall.

Nagel, who works in maintenance, installed two furnaces and removed about 4,000 pounds of Styrofoam from the garage roof, which he suspects was for insulation.

“The bones are really good in this place. It’s solid; the basement walls are over a foot thick,” he said, adding they’re also bluestone rather than sandstone, which can eventually deteriorate.

He also painted the walls dark blue, which two friends who helped him paint predicted would make the place “look like a dungeon,” Nagel said. But he’s pleased with how it turned out: spacious and light-filled, with contrasting white trim.

One of Nagel’s favorite features is a large wooden librarians’ desk with marble trim. It once stood in the middle of the room but is now in a corner with chairs around it.

The main floor also contains a wood-burning fireplace, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen with a dumbwaiter that can descend into the basement, though it currently needs repair.

The walk-out lower level is partly finished with a bathroom and a bedroom that Nagel has used while working on the main floor. There’s also a small stage and kitchen the community used for events when the building was a library.

Outside is patio space for a table and chairs where Nagel grills with friends. The previous owners landscaped the yard with peonies and day lilies; pear, apple and plum trees; and two kinds of grapes. The Concord grapes are “kind of like eating candy. They’re so delicious,” Nagel said, adding the plums are his favorite and “unbelievably sweet.”

Nagel said the previous owners wanted him to buy the place because he intended to keep its original structure and not convert it into apartments.

“I hope whoever buys it from me doesn’t do that, either,” Nagel said, adding it could make “a really good coffee shop, maybe a little bar or something.”

It is not listed on the National Register of Historic Places, though it possibly could be. National Register listing does not prevent exterior alterations, but doing those could disqualify a property from the distinction and the government grants for historic preservation that could come with it.

Even as it stands now, though, the changes in the interior saddened Meronek when she visited the house recently.

“It’s very, very, very hard for me to be in there,” she said. “I don’t expect it to stay the way it was. I never expected that. But I guess I just want to keep my memories, you know?”

Julie Brown (612-819-1455, juliebrown@edinarealty.com) and Sam Olson (218-355-8476, samolson@edinarealty.com) of Edina Realty have the $375,000 listing.