Public libraries have lately shifted their mission from culture to social services. The NY Public Library's main branch was almost a casualty of this trend.
When standing in front of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan, what one beholds is, in essence, a massive steel cage shrouded in marble and extensive Beaux-Arts stylings. The building's core is “the stacks”: seven floors and 88 miles of book shelves that, until recently, held most of the library's research collection.
Lately a proposal to remove the stacks—a marvel of engineering to some, an expendable relic to others—fueled one of the most spirited debates on New York's cultural scene in recent years. The Nation contributing writer Scott Sherman recounts the drama in his new book Patience and Fortitude.
To see why so much hell was raised over the so-called “Central Library Plan,” it's first necessary to understand the unique nature and history of the New York Public Library (NYPL). The NYPL operates dozens of branches throughout Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island (Queens and Brooklyn have their own systems) but it also ranks among the world's great research institutions.
Its holdings are larger than any other local library system in America and also different. Millions of books and a priceless archival collection do not circulate but may be consulted by anyone with a library card at 42nd Street or one of the three other research facilities.
Novelist Caleb Crain describes the library's animating ideal as “the belief that anyone should be able to walk in off the street and find out as much about a topic as has ever been published.”
This commitment to provide “anyone” with a university-quality research library attests to the ambitiousness of the NYPL's founders. It also turned out to be backbreakingly expensive. Sherman writes that “the research division … has been in fiscal distress almost from the beginning; the branch libraries, too, have been underfunded for much of their history.”
Sherman provides a brisk yet effective overview of the NYPL's 104-year history, indeed, probably one of the best we have. (Though strong treatments exist of its founding and first decades, the NYPL still lacks a comprehensive history). The library's bleakest era coincided with that of the city. In late 1976, “delinquents” took over one South Bronx branch and went on a two-day rampage. “[R]ecordings of speeches by Coretta Scott King” were not spared. Mayhem was also visited on 42nd Street, where in 1979, a mental patient repeatedly stabbed a patron in the head and neck. Staff and hours were drastically reduced: for a time, half of all branches opened only two days a week.
Those days now seem as distant as quadruple-digit annual murder rates, subway graffiti, and Times Square peep shows. But New York City's recent renaissance decades served more to gloss over what Sherman calls the library's “exceedingly fragile economic foundation” than to provide long-term budgetary stability.
This piece originally appeared in The Daily Beast
