Everything about Astor Library totally explained
The New York Public Library (
NYPL) is one of the leading
public libraries of the world and is one of America's most significant
research libraries. It is unusual in that it's composed of a very large circulating public library system combined with a very large non-lending research library system. It is simultaneously one of the largest public library systems in the United States and one of the largest research library systems in the world. It is a privately managed, nonprofit corporation with a public mission, operating with both private and public financing.
The historian David McCullough has described the New York Public Library as one of the five most important libraries in America, the others being the
Library of Congress, the
Boston Public Library, and the university libraries of
Harvard and
Yale.
The New York Public Library has branches in the boroughs of
Manhattan,
The Bronx and
Staten Island. New York City's other two boroughs,
Brooklyn and
Queens, are served by the
Brooklyn Public Library and the
Queens Borough Public Library respectively. These libraries predate the
consolidation of New York City.
Currently, the New York Public Library consists of 87 libraries: four non-lending research libraries, four main lending libraries, a library for the blind and physically handicapped, and 77 neighborhood branch libraries in the three boroughs served. All libraries in the NYPL system may be used free of charge by all visitors. As of 2007, the research collections contain 43,975,362 items (books, videotapes, maps, etc.) of which 15,985,192 are books. The Branch Libraries contain 7,299,286 items of which 4,416,812 are books. Together the collections total more than 50 million items, and the books number more than 20 million, a number surpassed by only the
Library of Congress and the
British Library.
If the three public library systems of New York City were considered as a single entity this unified library would have 208 branches and a collection of more than 30 million book volumes, making it the largest public library in the world.
History
Founding
An early benefactor of the New York Public Library was New York governor and presidential candidate
Samuel J. Tilden, who left the bulk of his fortune -- about $2.4 million -- to "establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York." At the time of Tilden's death in 1886, New York already had two important libraries: the
Astor Library, and the
Lenox Library.
The Astor Library was created by
John Jacob Astor, an immigrant who became the wealthiest man in America. When he died in
1848, he left $400,000 in his will for the establishment of a library in New York City. The Astor Library opened the following year,
1849. Although it wasn't a circulating library, it was a major reference library for research.
Over the decades, the library system added branch libraries, and the research collection expanded until, by the 1970s, it was clear the collection eventually would outgrow the existing structure. In the
1980s the central research library added more than 125,000 square feet (12,000 m²) of space and literally miles of bookshelf space to its already vast storage capacity to make room for future acquisitions. 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 and the park was restored above it.
On
July 17,
2007, the building was briefly evacuated and the surrounding area was cordoned off by New York police because of a suspicious package found across the street. It turned out to be a bag of old clothes.
In the three decades before 2007, the building's interior was gradually renovated.
On December 20, 2007, the library announced it'll undertake a three-year, $50 million renovation of the building exterior, which has suffered damage from weathering and pollution. These renovations will be underwritten by a $100-million gift from philanthropist
Stephen A. Schwarzman, whose name will be inscribed at the bottom of the columns which frame the building's entrances. Library officials expect that his name will be added some time in 2009 and that the larger restoration of the building’s facade will be completed in 2010.
Other research branches
Even though the central research library on 42nd Street had greatly expanded its capacity, in the
1990s the decision was made to remove that portion of the research collection devoted to science, technology, and business to a new location. The new location was the abandoned
B. Altman department store on 34th Street. In 1995, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the library, the $100 million Science, Industry and Business Library(SIBL), designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates of Manhattan, finally opened to the public. Upon the creation of the SIBL, the central research library on 42nd Street was renamed the Humanities and Social Sciences Library.
Today there are four research libraries that comprise the NYPL's outstanding research library system which hold approximately 43,000,000 items. Total item holdings, including the collections of the Branch Libraries, are 50.6 million. The Humanities and Social Sciences Library on 42nd Street is still the heart of the NYPL's research library system but the Science, Industry and Business Library, with approximately 2 million volumes and 60,000 periodicals, is quickly gaining greater prominence in the NYPL's research library system because of its up-to-date electronic resources available to the general public. The SIBL, the nation's largest public library devoted solely to science and business, provides users with broad access to science, technology, and business information via 150 networked computer work stations. The NYPL's two other research libraries are the Schomburg Center for Black Research and Culture, located at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in
Harlem and the
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, located at
Lincoln Center. In addition to their reference collections, the Library for the Performing Arts and the SIBL also have circulating components that are administered by the NYPL's Branch Libraries system.
Branch Libraries
The New York Public Library system maintains its commitment to being a public lending library through its branch libraries in
The Bronx,
Manhattan and
Staten Island, including 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. These circulating libraries offer a wide range of collections, programs, and services, including the renowned Picture Collection at Mid-Manhattan Library and the Media Center at Donnell.
Of its 82 branch libraries, 35 are in Manhattan, 34 are in the Bronx, and 11 are in Staten Island.
Telephone Reference Service
The New York Public library has a telephone-reference system that was organized as a separate library unit in 1968 and remains one of the largest. Located in the Mid-Manhattan Library branch at 455 Fifth Avenue, 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 their 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 can't call questioners back. Although the majority of calls are in English, the staff 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 telephone calls have declined recently to fewer than 150 a day from more than 1,000, they still made up two-thirds, or 41,715, of all inquiries 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 won't answer crossword or contest questions, do children's homework, or answer philosophical speculations.. The business reference desk number is 212-592-7000, ext 3.
Website
The New York Public Library
website
provides access to the library's catalogs, online collections and subscription databases, and has information about the library's free events, exhibitions, computer classes and English as a Second Language classes. The two online catalogs,
LEO (which searches the circulating collections) and
CATNYP (which searches the research collections) allow users to search the library's holdings of books, journals and other materials.
The NYPL gives cardholders free access
from home to thousands of current and historical magazines, newspapers, journals and reference books in subscription databases, including
EBSCOhost, which contains full text of major magazines;
full text of the New York Times (1995-present),
Gale's Ready Reference Shelf which includes the Encyclopedia of Associations and periodical indexes,
Books in Print; and
Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. In 2004, the library launched
eNYPL, which currently features an extensive collection of downloadable
audiobooks,
eBooks, music and video titles.
The
NYPL Digital Gallery is a database of half a million images digitized from the library's collections. The Digital Gallery was named one of Time Magazine's
50 Coolest Websites of 2005 and
Best Research Site of 2006 by an international panel of museum professionals.
Other
databases available only from within the library include Nature, IEEE and Wiley science journals, Wall Street Journal archives, and Factiva.
NYPL Law Enforcement
The NYPL maintains a force of NYC Special patrolman who provide security and protection to various libraries and NYPL Special investigators who oversee security operations at the library facilities. These officials have on duty arrest authority granted by NYS penal law.
However some library branches use contracted security guards for security.
The NYPL in popular culture
The NYPL has frequently appeared in feature
films. 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—a librarian in the basement reports seeing a ghost, which becomes violent when approached. 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.
Other films in which the library appears include
42nd Street (1933),
Portrait of Jennie (1948),
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961),
You're a Big Boy Now (1966),
Chapter Two (1979),
Escape from New York (1981),
Regarding Henry (1991),
The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), and
The Time Machine (2002).
- The NYPL was featured in the pilot episode of ABC's hit series Traveler, as the Drexler Museum Of Art, most often as backdrop or a brief meeting place for characters.
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 an 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 who in fact has the book that Jerry never returned so he could get revenge on him and George for his being fired in high school for giving George a wedgie.
The NYPL is the setting for much of '"The Persistence of Memory," the eleventh part of Carl Sagan's TV series.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall (2005), features a language researcher at NYPL who 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.
The NYPL is depicted on the cover of Raven Rise by D.J MacHale. The library plays an role in the book, as it's seen in the present and future, to which it's shown as the majority of it being destroyed.
Allen Kurzweil's The Grand Complication is the story of an NYPL librarian whose research skills are put to work finding a missing museum object.
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.
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).
Smaller mentions of the library can be found in:
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 [1988])
Arthur Guiterman’s “The Book Line; Rivington Street Branch, New York Public Library” (in his Ballads of Old New York [1920])
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Library Scene, Manhattan” (in his How to Paint Sunlight [2001])
James Haug’s “Heat: a Composite” (in his The Stolen Car [1989])
Muriel Rukeyser’s “Nuns in the Wind” (in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser [2005])
Paul Blackburn’s “Graffiti” (in The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn [1985])
E.B. White's "A Library Lion Speaks" and "Reading Room" (Poems and Sketches of E.B. White [1981])
James Turcotte’s poem series “The New York Public Library,” his moving meditation on his advancing AIDS, which appeared in the Minnesota Review (1993)
Ted Mathys’ "Inventory Entering the New York Public Library" (Gulf Coast [2005])
Jennifer Nostrand’s "The New York Public Library" (Manhattan Poetry Review [1989])
Susan Thomas’ "New York Public Library" (the anthology American Diaspora [2001])
Aaron Zeitlin's poem about going to the library, included in his 2-volume Ale lider un poemes [CompleteLyrics and Poems] (1967 and 1970)
Other
Excerpts from several of the many memoirs and essays mentioning The New York Public Library 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, serving Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, is one of three separate and independent public library systems in New York City. The other two library systems are the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Borough Public Library. The three library systems combined operate a total of 208 library branches.
According to the latest Mayor’s Management Report, New York City’s three public library systems had a total library circulation of 35 million broken down as follows: the NYPL and BPL (with 143 branches combined) had a circulation of 15 million, and the QBPL system had a circulation of 20 million through its 62 branch libraries. Altogether the three library systems also hosted 37 million visitors in 2006.
Private libraries in New York City, some of which can be used by the public, are listed in Directory of Special Libraries and Information Centers (Gale)Further Information
Get more info on 'Astor Library'.
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