New York Public Library

The New York Public Library (NYPL), one of three public library systems serving New York City, is one of the leading libraries in the United States. The other New York public systems are those of Brooklyn and Queens.

The Public Library's main building on Fifth Avenue (image, right) is the crowning achievement of the Beaux-Arts architectural firm of Carrere and Hastings. Its status as one of the world's leading libraries is confirmed by its possession of (for instance) a Gutenberg Bible and a Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

History

In the late nineteenth century, New York City had two reference libraries open to the public: the Astor Library, founded by a $400,000 bequest of John Jacob Astor (1763–1848), which had opened in 1849, and the Lenox Library, founded by James Lenox (1800–1880), a book collector, which stood on the Fifth Avenue site now occupied by the Frick Collection.

In 1886, Samuel J. Tilden (1814–1886) made a bequest of about $2.4 million to establish a library in New York City. John Bigelow (1817–1911), a New York attorney, was a trustee of the Tilden will, and formulated a plan to combine the resources of the financially-strapped Astor and Lenox libraries with the Tilden bequest to form "The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations". This entity came into being as a private foundation on May 23, 1895.

The library consolidated with The New York Free Circulating Library in February, 1901, and Andrew Carnegie donated $5.2 million to construct branch libraries, with the proviso that the City of New York fund their maintenance and operations. The New York Public Library is thus a partnership of city government with private philanthropy.

The main Research Library (now known as the Humanities and Social Science Library) was built on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan between 40th and 42nd Streets, and was dedicated on May 23, 1911, opening the next day. The famous lions guarding the entrance were sculpted by Edward Clark Potter. They were originally named Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, in honor of the library's founders. These names were transformed into Lord Astor and Lady Lenox (although both lions are male). In the 1930s they were nicknamed "Patience" and "Fortitude" by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. He chose these names because he felt that the citizens of New York would need to possess these qualities to see themselves through the Great Depression. Patience is on the south side (the left as one faces the main entrance) and Fortitude on the north. (New Yorkers eschew such pompous names and refer to them as "Uptown" and "Downtown.")

The main reading room of the Research Library, the famous room 315, is one of the most majestic sights one may see; 78 feet (23.8 m) wide by 297 feet (90.5 m) long, with ceilings 52 feet (15.8 m) high; surrounded by open shelves, both on the main level and the balcony, which contain standard and not so standard reference works of all kinds; tall windows and chandeliers above; long tables with comfortable chairs and brass lamps; computers with access to the library collections and to the internet; docking facilities for laptops; readers comfortably at work with materials from the closed stacks, brought to their seats by the staff on request. All of this, and more, available without charge to anyone. Many notable authors have cited research in this room as seminal in their work. Many others, out of work during the Great Depression, used this resource to give themselves the equivalent of a university education.

In the 1980s the library added more than 125,000 square feet (12,000 m²) of space to its storage capacity. This expansion required a major construction project in which Bryant Park, directly west of the library, was closed to the public and excavated. The new library facilities were built below ground level. The park was then restored on top of the underground facilities and re-opened to the public.

The Humanities and Social Sciences Library on 42nd Street is only one of four libraries that comprise NYPL's Research Libraries. The others are the Schomburg Center for Black Research and Culture, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Science Industry and Business Library. The Library for the Performing Arts and the Science Industry and Business Library also have circulating components that are administered by the NYPL's Branch Libraries system.

Branches

The NYPL maintains 80 neighborhood branch libraries and five central circulating libraries throughout The Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. (Queens and Brooklyn maintain their own library systems.) Neighborhood branch locations offer popular fiction, basic research materials, and recreational programs. NYPL's five central circulating libraries (The Mid-Manhattan Library, The Donnell Library Center, The Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, the circulating collections of the Science, Industry and Business Library, and the circulating collections of the Library for the Performing Arts) are all in or near midtown Manhattan and offer a wide range of in-depth collections, programs, and services, including the renowned Picture Collection at Mid-Manhattan Library and the Media Center at Donnell.

Telephone Reference Service

The New York Public library has a telephone-reference system that was organized as a separate library unit in 1968. Few, if any, telephone-reference services are as large or as storied as that of the New York Public Library. Located in the midtown Manhattan branch at 455 Fifth Avenue, near the main research branch, the unit has 10 researchers with degrees ranging from elementary education, chemistry, mechanical engineering and criminal justice, to a Ph.D. in English literature. They can consult with as many as 50 other researchers in the library system.

Under library rules, each inquiry must be answered in under five minutes, meaning the caller gets an answer or somewhere to go for an answer — like a specialty library, trade group or Web site. Researchers cannot call back questioners. Although the majority of calls are in English, researchers can get by in Chinese, Spanish, German and some Yiddish. Specialty libraries, like the Slavic and Baltic division, can lend a hand with, for example, Albanian.

Internet inquiries make up only a third of the questions, but they can take up to 35 minutes each and 85% of total staff time. Internet inquiries come by e-mail (13,398 in 2005) and a one-on-one chat that resembles instant messaging (7,220 in 2005). While the number of telephone calls has declined over the years to fewer than 150 a day from more than 1,000, they still made up two-thirds, or 41,715, of all inquiries to the staff in 2005; the rest were by computer.

Every day, except Sundays and holidays, between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, anyone, of any age, from anywhere in the world can telephone 212-340-0849 and ask a question. The library staff will not answer crossword or contest questions, do children's homework, or answer philosophical speculations."Library Phone Answerers Survive the Internet." The New York Times 19 June 2006.^*

Website

The New York Public Library website allows for book searching, research, and online learning. The two online catalogs, LEO (which searches the circulating collections) and CATNYP (which searches the research collections), search the large collections and find research materials.

The Library in literature and film

The NYPL has frequently appeared in feature films, most often as backdrop or a brief meeting place for characters. It serves as the backdrop for a central plot development in the 2002 film Spider-Man and a major location in the 2004 apocalyptic science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow. It is also featured prominently in the 1984 film Ghostbusters. In the film, a librarian in the basement reported seeing a ghost, which became violent when approached. Other films in which the library appears include Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), You're a Big Boy Now (1966), Chapter Two (1979), Escape from New York (1981), The Time Machine (2002), and "Regarding Henry" (1991). In the 1978 film, The Wiz, Dorothy and Toto stumble across the Library and one of the Library Lions comes alive and joins them on their journey out of Oz.

In the episode "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" in the animated television series Futurama, the giant brain is confronted by Fry in the library. In an episode of Seinfeld, Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) dates a NYPL librarian, Jerry Seinfeld is accosted by a library cop (Philip Baker Hall) for late fees, and George Costanza (Jason Alexander) encounters his high school gym teacher living homeless on the building's stairs.

In novels, Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall (2005), features a language researcher at NYPL grapples with her past following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Cynthia Ozick's 2004 novel Heir to the Glimmering World, set just prior to World War II, involves a refugee-scholar from Hitler's Germany researching the Karaite Jews at NYPL. In the 1996 novel Contest by Matthew Reilly the NYPL is the setting for an intergalactic gladiatorial fight that results in the building's total destruction. In 1985, novelist Jerome Badanes based his novel The Final Opus of Leon Solomon on the real-life tragedy of an impoverished scholar who stole books from the Jewish Division, only to be caught and commit suicide. In the 1984 murder mystery by Jane Smiley, Duplicate Keys, an NYPL librarian stumbles on two dead bodies, circa 1930. Donna Hill, who was herself an NYPL librarian in the 1950s, set her 1965 novel Catch a Brass Canary at an NYPL branch library. Lawrence Blochman's 1942 mystery Death Walks in Marble Halls features a murder committed using a brass spindle from a catalog drawer.

Smaller mentions of the library can be found in Henry Sydnor Harrison's 1913 novel V.V.'s Eyes; P. G. Wodehouse's 1919 A Damsel in Distress; James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953); Stephen King's 1980 Firestarter; B.J. Chute's 1986 The Good Woman; Sarah Schulman's 1986 Girls, Visions and Everything; and in Isaac Bashevis Singer's posthumous Shadows on the Hudson (1998). A charming, lightly fictionalized portrait of the Jewish Division's first chief, Abraham Solomon Freidus, is found in a chapter of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Bernard Malamud’s short story "The German Refugee," (in his Complete Stories ^*; originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1963) mentions the library, as does the story "Owd Bob" in Christopher Morley's 1919 humor book, Mince Pie.

Both branches and the central building have been immortalized in numerous poems, including Richard Eberhart’s “Reading Room, The New York Public Library” (in his Collected Poems, 1930-1986 Arthur Guiterman’s “The Book Line; Rivington Street Branch, New York Public Library” (in his Ballads of Old New York Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Library Scene, Manhattan” (in his How to Paint Sunlight ^*);" target="_blank" >James Haug’s “Heat: a Composite” (in his The Stolen Car Muriel Rukeyser’s “Nuns in the Wind” (in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser ^*);" target="_blank" >Paul Blackburn’s “Graffiti” (in The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn [1985). Two poems by E.B. White (“A Library Lion Speaks” and “Reading Room” appear in Poems and Sketches of E.B. White (1981).

James Turcotte’s moving meditation on his advancing AIDS takes the form of a poem series called “The New York Public Library,” which appeared in the Minnesota Review in 1993, the year Turcotte died. Other notable periodical poetry about the library includes Ted Mathys’ “Inventory Entering the New York Public Library” in Gulf Coast in 2005 and Jennifer Nostrand’s “The New York Public Library” in the Manhattan Poetry Review, 1989. The anthology American Diaspora (2001) includes Susan Thomas’ “New York Public Library.” Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin wrote a poem about going to the library, included in his 2-volume Ale lider un poemes Lyrics and Poems, published in 1967 and 1970.

Memoirs and essays mentioning The New York Public Library are too numerous to list, but several interesting excerpts are included in the anthology Reading Rooms (1991), including reminiscences by Alfred Kazin, Henry Miller, and Kate Simon.

Other New York City library systems

The New York Public Library is one of three separate and independent public library systems in New York City. The other two are The Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Borough Public Library.

External links

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