Located about a mile southwest of the University of Southern California campus, in the Vermont Square district, it was built in 1913 with a grant from Andrew Carnegie.

The Vermont Square Branch was designated as a Historic-Cultural Monument (#264) by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission in June 1983 as the oldest remaining library in the city system.

The newness of the library, furniture and books were a real luxury to us who had been used to the gloomy, rented store buildings but there was one crumpled rose leaf which marred our serenity of spirit.

[7]The Los Angeles Times described the opening of the "artistic" new structure as follows: The handsome building is of fireproof construction, the exterior being cased in cream-colored glazed brick and white tile.

The roof is of the genuine Spanish type, constructed of hollow red tile, set off by a heavy frieze of open woodwork under the eaves, to match the coping around the top of the open-air reading room on the northeast corner, both being painted a soft green color in pleasant contrast to the exterior finish.

The branch celebrated its 70th anniversary in 1983, bestowing an award on Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith, who had been a patron of the library as a boy in the 1920s.

In a column paying tribute to the museum where he spent his youth, Smith wrote that he developed his "literary style and attitudes toward life at those low round tables in the children's room.

"[3] The grandsons of the developer who subdivided the area and donated the land for Vermont Square Park wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times noting the role of the library in their own childhoods: "The books I borrowed enabled me to follow the adventures of Tarzan, fight the battles of the Civil War, attend West Point as a plebe, explore the dark forests of the Belgian Congo in pursuit of that huge, ferocious, man-eating monster, the gorilla, as I then thought it to be.

Nagasawa's artwork consists of functional library furniture, including 11 preschool stools in the shape of letters that spell out the word "IMAGINATION," and a glass table sandblasted with the names of books that have been banned in some of America's public schools.