Hidden Secrets of the New York Public Library

(lively classical music)

(smooth jazz music)

[Keith] We're on 5th Avenue and 41st Street,

facing the facade of the New York Public Library.

[Judith] Which, when it was built,

was the largest marble structure ever done

in the country, which was appropriate for New York,

which was becoming one of the most important cities

in the world and the city leaders realized

that we needed a great library.

[Keith] The lions, Patience and Fortitude, and Patience is

on the left as you face the building, Fortitude

on the right, were designed by Edward Clark Potter.

Carved by the Piccirilli brothers, they were named,

so the story goes, by Mayor LaGuardia

because he felt patience and fortitude

were the qualities that New Yorkers needed

to get through the Great Depression.

(soft jazz music)

[Paul] If you look up, you have these sculptures

by Paul Wayland Bartlett, which are allegorical sculptures,

so they stand in for the various fields

that would be represented by the collections

of the library, so you have, going from left to right,

History, Romance, Poetry, Religion, Drama, and Philosophy.

[Keith] New York Public Library was a consolidation

of other libraries, notably the Astor Library,

the Lenox Library, New York Free Circulating Library,

and you can see those names on the facade.

[Paul] So one of the things that's interesting

about the exterior here, the whole building is raised

up on this terrace, setting the building on a terrace

or within a sort of landscape setting comes

out of a villa and sort of palace tradition of Europe.

And one of the most interesting things is

that it actually spans two full blocks along 5th Avenue.

[Judith] When it opened on May 23rd, 1911,

there were a million books there,

more than 50,000 people visited on the very first day.

[Keith] As you go in, we're honoring the Astor family

for their support, naming the hall Astor Hall.

[Judith] Your feeling of walking

into this space is going into an area of majesty.

[Keith] As you walk in, you do not see staircases

in front of you, the staircases are on either side,

so you stop and you look around, and then you proceed

to where you want to go, you're not just running

through the main hall, and this is intentional.

When the building opened in 1911,

it was the largest marble-clad structure

in the United States, it's about four acres worth of marble.

[Judith] It's all of beautiful white Vermont marble,

with very delicate graining, which gives it some texture.

[Keith] I should note that the designs

of all the decoration in the building are done

by Carrère and Hastings, who were the architects

of the building, much of it by Thomas Hastings himself.

[Paul] We're looking at these lamp standards,

the four of them that sort of frame the center of the room.

It starts to give us a glimpse of the richness

of the decoration on the interior, every surface,

every room, every aspect of the building is enriched

with all sorts of decorative work.

This was a huge collaborative project

with lots of especially immigrant craftsmen

from Europe to make every detail in this building

enriched and a sort of visual treat for the visitor.

[Keith] We're coming up to some busts that were added

about 20 years after the building opened,

this is Thomas Hastings, and on the other stair landing,

you'll see also Carrère's bust, they of course

didn't include their busts in the original design,

but they were added to honor them

for what a great structure they built.

[Paul] So these stairs lead you up to the second level,

and there's a clear progression all the way

through the building, continuing up to the next level,

there are these long corridors and gallery spaces

that are today used for special exhibitions.

[Judith] Looking down on the lobby,

you can again see what an impressive entrance this is.

The top of each of the three doorways

is capped with a classical pediment.

[Paul] So the classical tradition in architecture was

part of American architecture from the very beginning,

we can think of Jefferson and his design

for Monticello, his own home, and there was a sense

in which the architects thought this was a timeless style,

it went beyond any particular period,

and it was a way to indicate the formality,

the importance, the publicness, of civic architecture.

[Keith] Now, as we ascend the staircase

up to the McGraw Rotunda on the third floor,

it's really rather stunning.

[Judith] Certainly, the most impressive in terms

of decorative impact, the ceiling vault is carried

over the cornice at the north and south ends, so that you

can reveal the windows and bring in natural light.

This room is wood up to the cornice,

everything else is plaster and painted.

[Keith] The mural program in here is the history

of the written word, you have a depiction of Moses,

a scribe copying text, you can see here is Gutenberg,

he invents, of course, movable type in metal in Europe.

And that's Ottmar Mergenthaler, who invented

the Linotype machine, which was very important

to publishing, and helping New York

become the publishing capital of North America.

The way the building is designed,

you would ascend the staircase as we did,

and then head into the catalog room,

if we all remember card catalogs, find in the card catalog

what you're looking for, and order it.

[Judith] We should look at the beautiful woodwork

on the pedestals of the desks,

the desks are of Renaissance styled oak.

[Keith] In the past, all of these walls were covered

with card catalogs, and your call slip would be sent

via a pneumatic tube system to the old stacks,

which are below the Rose Main Reading Room.

The library started cataloging electronically in 1971.

So as you enter the Rose Main Reading Room,

there is a quote by John Milton,

we have a tremendous collection of Milton,

really, on a worldwide scale, in the library,

so it's appropriate you would see this

as you enter the Rose Main Reading Room.

[Judith] The most famous room

in the library is the Rose Main Reading Room.

[Paul] You can see the similar architectural articulation

to the previous catalog room with the giant arches

and the very large windows, so there's lots

of natural light, but again, you're up

on the third floor, so you're removed

from the noise and busyness of the city below.

And so it was meant to be a sort of retreat for scholars,

a place to really focus on one's work.

[Judith] The Landmarks Preservation Commission

has the option of choosing individual spaces to designate.

It was rather shocking to the architectural

and design community that the Rose Reading Room

was not designated originally, but the whole process

of landmarking ends up being a balance

between updating facilities, and keeping historic landmarks

as they were so that people can appreciate them.

[Paul] As you look up, you see these beautiful ceilings,

it's the morning sky, designed by James Wall Finn.

[Judith] This is one of the largest rooms

in the country without a dome or columns,

or steel-reinforced walls to support the ceiling.

In that sense, it's something of an engineering achievement.

It's just about the size of a football

field, almost two blocks long.

[Paul] Right beneath this room are the seven layers

of cast iron and steel stacks, and the reason

why it can be so long without any interior supports is

that all of the structural support is

beneath it in the metal stacks.

[Keith] At the end of the North Hall, Room 328,

is the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room,

that contains the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.

This is reserved strictly for researchers.

Anyone is welcome to do research

in the New York Public Library,

this is what makes us unique in the world.

These are archival collections, the rarest pieces we have.

This is a Gutenberg Bible, from the year 1455,

from James Lenox's collection, it was the first one

to come to the New World, by today's estimates,

it's worth nearly $100 million.

The research collections alone contain 45 million items,

so there's going to be something that you're interested in.

All the books you see in the Rose Main Reading Room are

general reference, and they're browsable,

there are nearly 27,000 of these reference books,

dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers,

things of this nature, and very commonly read books,

you know, complete Shakespeare.

(soft jazz music)

The room is divided down the center

by an enclosure for where the librarians work.

[Judith] When you request a book from one of the areas

where the books are not on the shelves,

you fill out a slip, your slip is transferred downstairs

to the stacks, someone retrieves it, brings it back up,

it's brought back up in an automated trolley,

and you retrieve your book from the library desk.

(soft jazz music)

[Keith] The library's collection is so big

that what we keep on site are the newest

and oldest pieces, and the most requested pieces.

To be able to hold more material on site,

the library built a state-of-the-art storage center

beneath Bryant Park that can hold

about four million cataloged items.

[Paul] Stretches all the way under the park,

essentially out to the fountain, which is on 6th Avenue.

And then there's this long conveyor belt that transports

books and manuscripts into the building itself.

[Judith] What's interesting about these kind

of stacks is they can be very close together

when you're not using them, and because you can move them,

you can open up the space for access.

[Keith] In our storage below, things are stored

by size, everything is bar coded, they are marked,

and they are kept as compact as possible.

There are a number of media downstairs as well,

there is microfilm, there are manuscripts

and books, there are all kinds of things.

So if you're out in the park on the grass,

or if you're skating in Bryant Park in the winter,

just know that there are librarians

downstairs working, delivering materials

to the other reading rooms in the building.

(soft jazz music)

The third floor has a number of special collections,

and these are supervised reading areas

for specific topics, the Pforzheimer Collection

we're looking at now, it's all about Shelley

and his circle, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron,

Percy Bysshe Shelley, et cetera, the English romantics.

The contents of the room are from Pforzheimer's own library

in his home, like the book here, by Mary Wollstonecraft,

The Vindication of the Rights of Woman,

the most influential work of early feminist philosophy.

(lively jazz music)

As you enter the Berg Collection Room

from the third floor corridor, if you go straight ahead,

you'll see two paintings of the brothers themselves,

Henry and Albert, they were both a physician and surgeon,

they'd been collecting books all their lives,

and their holdings are remarkable.

Like this incredible Shakespeare first folio of 1623.

In the corner is a writing table

that once belonged to Charles Dickens,

and the chair, the legend is that Mayor LaGuardia sat

in the chair when the room opened, and broke the caning,

and it had to be (snickering) recaned almost immediately,

so no sitting allowed in that particular chair.

(lively jazz music)

Now let's head down to the first floor.

(lively jazz music)

We're entering the Milstein Division in U.S. History,

it's local history, and this is a tremendous place

to do genealogical research, we have a lot of access

to the city's vital records, vital records being

birth and death and marriage records, census materials,

passenger ship lists, city directories,

there are tremendous things here if you have any interest

in New York history, or genealogy, the holdings are amazing.

[Paul] The stacks were created by the Snead Company,

they were using cast iron and steel

to create a self-sustaining structure.

The way they designed the shelves,

they were able to put more into less space,

they essentially invented a new way

of storing huge amounts of books

for this particular library, and it was

essentially fireproof because it was metal.

Not completely, as we would expect today,

but much more so than the wooden bookcases

that had been in use in libraries in the 19th century,

so you can imagine what a problem that creates.

[Keith] Heading down to the ground floor,

the way the building was originally built,

the ground floor had its own entrance from 42nd Street.

This is where you came into originally a lending library,

to the children's library, and the Bartos Forum.

So here the Bartos Forum, gorgeous room,

this is cast iron, the beautiful yellow marbles

on the wall are Italian, this is as it was when it opened,

around the side and the middle were more bookshelves

because it was a lending library once.

[Judith] This is a 30-foot high glass dome ceiling.

This is a very large space used for lectures,

the series of library lectures,

which are very popular, almost invariably sold out,

it's also rented for special events.

Each area of the library has its own identity,

and there is a gradual ascendance from the lower levels

to the upper level, which is consistent

with the idea of classical architecture.

[Paul] This was down below, it's a little bit

less exalted of a entry to get into this room,

and I think they also felt freer, then,

to sort of experiment by using these new materials,

and create something of a different experience in this room.

[Keith] So as you head to the children's room,

one of the real highlights from the collection is

the original Winnie-the-Pooh and friends.

These plush toys, or stuffed animals,

belonged to Christopher Robin Milne,

Winnie was a gift for his first birthday,

and he's named after a bear, in fact,

from the London Zoo, who the zookeepers named Winnie

because he was from Winnipeg, Canada.

And then along with the collection, you have Tigger,

and Eeyore, and Kanga, and Piglet.

I'm afraid Roo is not with the rest of them, because Roo

was lost on a family picnic, apparently, in the 1930s.

Now, on the first floor, also we have the map room,

the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division.

There are about half million maps in the collection,

another 20,000 atlases, or books devoted to cartography.

Here's a great example of an atlas of the world

by Johannes Blaeu, from the 1660s.

(soft jazz music)

[Judith] When you look at this globe,

most of the visitors, obviously, have pointed

to the location of New York City, and we can see

that that particular spot on the globe is worn down.

[Keith] So, if you look up above the computers

to a large double hemisphere map, on the left hemisphere,

you'll see California as an island,

which is what we know today to be a mistake,

although many people think it's a vision of the future,

if you've followed plate tectonics, this is a mistake

that goes on for a few centuries, unknown why it happened,

but conjecture is an explorer went

up the Gulf of California, perhaps,

and didn't go all the way, and just made the assumption

it was an island, and that became the rule,

and other cartographers copied this.

So we have a number on display

in the Main Reading Room just for fun.

[Paul] As you go through Astor Hall and then turn

either right or left, that main space is

called the South North Gallery.

It's entirely outfitted in marble,

but the marble of the walls are Pentelic marble,

which comes from Greece, and it's the marble

that was used to construct the Parthenon.

[Judith] We see octagonal coffering on the ceiling here,

and decorative ornament in recesses,

to relieve the monotony of walking down a hallway.

[Paul] And then you see lions' heads

throughout the building, it's just a way

of suggesting the power, the stability of the institution,

the idea that the lion is the protector of the building is

a common symbol in these classical buildings.

So this is the gates into the Gottesman Exhibition Hall,

modeled on some 17th century gates at the Louvre in Paris.

[Keith] The ceilings in here are oak, they were designed

by Maurice Grieve, and carved by his studio,

and it's really just a tremendous ceiling.

The Gottesman Hall has always been an exhibition hall,

it's important with a collection this size

to constantly show the public the depth

and the breadth of the collections.

[Paul] So another thing that happens

in this North South Gallery, you can see

the busts along some of these niches,

it's a sort of pantheon of ancient luminaries,

so you have Sophocles and Demosthenes,

and other important Greek and Roman figures.

[Keith] So we're heading down the first floor

corridor toward the south, and we find

room 108, the periodicals room.

[Paul] A very sumptuously decorated interior,

carved wooden ceiling, and then all

along the sides are these more recent images,

I believe they're from the early 1980s by the artist

Richard Haas, and they feature buildings associated

with major publishing enterprises in New York City.

(soft jazz music)

[Keith] So if you look beneath the surface of the tables

throughout the lobby, you'll see

the Seal of the State of New York, and again,

this is part of the original design by Carrère and Hastings.

And then we'll head down to the newest part

of the library, the South Court Building.

[Judith] The challenge of expanding, or adding

onto an old building, is whether to honor the architecture,

or whether to essentially ignore it.

[Keith] Knowing the digital age was coming upon us,

it was very clear the library needed to build something

for the internet, for computers,

so 2002, the South Court Building opens.

The South Court Building was added

by Davis Brody Bond Architects.

[Judith] It's a six-story glass structure

in the southern courtyard of the building,

and in a way, it's rejecting the idea

of honoring the building, except in the materials used.

But it's not visible from the front of the building,

so it doesn't fight with the facade.

[Keith] We have classrooms, where computers are

at every seat, so you can do all kinds

of e-resource training there, and there's an auditorium

that's used for author talks and other public programs,

it's really in use constantly.

This foundation is partially the foundation

of what existed before, and that is the Croton Aqueduct

Distributing Reservoir from Midtown Manhattan,

often also known as the Murray Hill Reservoir.

This was a really key plot in the middle

of the new New York of Midtown, Vanderbilt's train station,

Grand Central, was just a few blocks away,

everyone was coming north, and it was an ideal site.

It's notable that the marble on the floors is

the same marble from Vermont that is used

to build the rest of the building.

If you look up, you can see the exterior of the building

as if you were standing in the original courtyard.

So in the north stair landing,

and you have the other architect, Carrère.

If you're looking toward 5th Avenue,

Carrère and Hastings are in their correct spots,

Carrère on the left, Hastings on the right.

[Paul] A very minor detail to note, but someone

who is particularly interested in classical architecture

would spot this right away, is that in the entablature

along Astor Hall, it actually omits parts

of the entablature called the frieze.

It's this sort of compressed version to create this sense

of heaviness and stability on the interior of the building.

[Keith] So as we exit the building,

and go outside, it's worth looking back

to see some of the details of the building.

[Paul] So you can see the large vases here,

which are on the terrace next to the fountains,

a very Parisian, French element of landscape architecture,

you see these kinds of things,

for instance, at the Parterre at Versailles.

[Judith] Virtually all of the major government buildings

in this country are designed in Beaux-Arts style.

Everything from the White House

to virtually every courthouse and public building

in every major city across America.

This continued until the beginnings of modernism.

[Paul] Part of the foresight of these architects

to raise this building up on a podium

and set it on a terrace was the fact that they knew

no building could ever get so close

that would completely crowd in and block the light.

So even though there are very tall buildings all around it,

it still has enough breathing room that it can be ensured

that it will never be totally blocked off.

[Keith] The flagpole bases are really some

of the great bronze sculptures outside in New York.

Thomas Hastings did the drawings of these,

and they were cast by Tiffany Studios.

The four figures represent Civilization,

Conquest, Discovery, and Navigation.

Four continents are depicted on the four sides,

and you also have the astrological signs of the zodiac

spinning around above, and these are all taken

from classical training that the architects had.

On the northeast corner, you have the cornerstone,

and the date is 1902, and why is it 1902

and the building opened in 1911, well, in fact,

it took nine years to construct this building.

[Judith] When it was finished, the cost

of the building was $9 million,

which would be a lot more in present-day time.

The exterior was finished in 1906,

but it took five more years to do the interiors.

[Paul] You can see here the massiveness of the building,

right, you have these hugely thick walls,

all load-bearing masonry, the outside sheathed in limestone.

They're designed to feel imposing,

important, but also long-lasting,

like this institution will always be here.

[Judith] The main building was renamed in 2008

the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

Schwarzman is the President of The Blackstone Group,

who gave $100 million towards the restoration

of the library, which reopened in 2011,

just in time to celebrate its centennial.

[Paul] So the Bryant Park facade of the building is

very different from the front, so you have

this cliff wall, almost, of stone and glass,

and these very narrow, thin strips of window,

and it gives this a sort of modernistic feel

to the back of the building, which was a little bit

controversial at the time, because for some critics,

it felt like it was too much of a difference

from the rest of the building.

So you have the large arched windows,

and then these little pedimented windows.

In fact, these are doorways, it was thought

at the time that there might need to be expansion

of the stacks out towards the park,

and so these doorways were built in to allow that

to happen more naturally if it ever expanded.

[Keith] Because 42nd Street, you know, is,

and Times Square is just a few blocks away,

Grand Central's in the other direction,

the Port Authority Building, visitors

to New York always end up in Midtown,

it's just right in the center of everything,

and yet it's an oasis that's inviting,

the idea of going in and just relaxing,

and reading, it's just so attractive,

and it draws people from all over the world.