For over 50 years, the Joseph W. England Library has stood as a landmark on St. Joe’s University City campus, formerly the campus of the University of the Sciences.
Completed in early October 1973, the building’s earliest history is rolled tight in a thin stack of blueprints bound by a rubber band into a fraying cylinder.
Unrolling the prints reveals each paper’s torn sides and edges, curled at the corners. The papers, held in St. Joe’s Archives Collection, are the color of coffee stains or khaki pants, reminiscent of colonial era newspapers.
The illustrations themselves were drawn with thin, blue-gray lines under the supervision of Philadelphia architect Alfred Panepinto. They form perfect square boxes packed with words and measurements written out in neat, capital letters to represent reading lounges, information centers, elevators and book stacks.
The first blueprint, dated April 20, 1972, makes plans for the library’s apothecary jar display space on the first floor, which would feature some of the university’s collection of intricately decorated vessels created to store or mix herbs and powders.
The final blueprint, dated Nov. 2, 1972, was the floor plan for the library’s first floor.
Lesley Carey, archivist at Drexel Library, said it is important to hold on to relics from North America’s first pharmacy college, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, which changed its name to University of the Sciences in 1998.
“If they end up, in coming years, not having the building there, then it really is a record of what was there,” Carey said.
The England Library was scheduled to close in fall of 2025, per St. Joe’s Library Director Anne Krakow’s announcement to the Saint Joseph’s University Libraries website Aug. 16. The building’s malfunctioning air conditioning forced an early closure Aug. 23.
The university is scheduled to evaluate whether England can be reopened as a study area Sept. 30.
Carey said the library is a testament to the generosity of Joseph W. England and his daughter, Elizabeth England, who was one of the major donors to the library. Both Englands pursued careers in the medical field.
“[Elizabeth] was taught by her father, who was a pharmacist and instrumental in the founding and the continuing of the school, to be of service to others,” Carey said. “That’s, to me, a remarkable part of this building.”
