

The New York Public Library, glass negative from 1908 depicting horse carriages and trolleys. Late stage construction: trademark lions not yet installed. Image: Library of Congress

T echnically speaking, the term “New York Public Library” refers to the four research libraries and eighty-seven branch libraries—forty-four in Manhattan alone—that comprise the city’s vast and enviable library system. But New Yorkers stubbornly use the term to mean the central library on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets, refusing to call it the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, after the donor who gave $100 million in 2008. It is that building that is the subject of a furiously ambitious and furiously contentious renovation known as the Central Library Plan (CLP).

The clp has a great many moving parts. First, the library proposes to sell two of its nearby buildings: the aging Mid-Manhattan Library across from the Schwarzman building on Fifth Avenue and the underused Science, Industry & Business Library at Madison Avenue and 34th Street (previously the B. Altman building). The proceeds from these two sales are expected to total $210 million. With that sum, and another $150 million promised by the city, the Schwarzman building will be radically transformed. It will absorb the Mid-Manhattan Library, which will move into the space now occupied by the seven stories of steel book stacks directly beneath the main reading room. These stacks are to be removed along with the three million volumes they hold. A portion will find a home beneath Bryant Park, where there are already three acres of underground shelving. Another 1.3 million were to be shipped to an offsite storage facility near Princeton, although recently, under mounting criticism, the library has promised the bulk will be kept on in the underground facility.

The showpiece of the CLP is the new Mid-Manhattan Library, an 80,000 square foot facility for which designs have already been made by Norman Foster, Britain’s most famous architect—and reputedly the richest. Foster has made a name for transforming national landmarks (his massive thumbprint rests on the British Museum and the Berlin Reichstag, among others), typically with a bold sculptural act. Here one will be needed, for once the book stacks have been dismantled, the reading room will be suspended in space. His preliminary renderings showed a vast atrium capped by a delicately vaulted canopy carried on a double row of slender columns.

The CLP was first announced, along with Foster’s appointment, five years ago and with curious timing: It came in October 2008, as the country was preoccupied by a financial crisis and a momentous national election. At the time, a distracted public offered little comment; had work begun immediately, it is conceivable that Foster’s new library might well be lumbering to completion now, as was envisioned. But once the public began to scrutinize the plans, it reacted with indignation and alarm. Of course, one must make allowances for the quibble factor—the learned but directionless nitpicking that afflicts all public initiatives in New York, especially those touching on real estate or culture, or both, as in this case. But the opposition that emerged is startlingly broad and eclectic, and any movement that can unite such disparate individuals as Mario Vargas Llosa and Salman Rushdie, and such radically opposed publications as The Nation and City Journal, deserves a close look.

T he New York Public Library is the result of a convergence of three acts of philanthropy. In 1849, the fur trader John Jacob Astor created the Astor Library, the city’s first public library; he was followed in 1870 by James Lenox, a painfully reclusive bibliophile who had inherited thirty acres along Fifth Avenue, which he used to build the Lenox Library with its specialized collection of rare books and manuscripts. Both men were shrewd architectural patrons: The Astor Library was a superb essay in the progressive German Rundbogenstil by Alexander Saeltzer, a pupil of Schinkel (the building survives on Lafayette Street as New York’s Public Theater). And the Lenox Library was the first great work of Richard Morris Hunt, a sophisticated performance in the French neo-grec mode.

The final act of philanthropy came with the bequest by Samuel J. Tilden (the unhappy winner of the popular vote in the 1876 presidential election) of funds to build “a free public library.” By 1895, both the Astor and Lenox libraries were in straitened circumstances and the Tilden bequest made it possible for the three trusts to pool their resources to create a single grand library—hence the trio of arches that forms the entrance of the library, each bearing the name of one of its founders.

An architectural competition was promptly held, resulting in the appointment of two obscure young architects, John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings (surely to the appalled disbelief of McKim, Mead & White, who had just completed the Boston Public Library and felt entitled to this project). Carrère and Hastings worked on the building without interruption from 1897 to 1911, and did so with an exquisite attention to detail and materials that is virtually unknown in this country. In order to gauge the building’s sculptural properties in sunlight, they built a full-scale mockup of a portion of the façade, just as Michelangelo had once done for the Farnese Palace. Any detail was subject to sensitive revision. For example, shortly before the opening, the architects became disenchanted with the three keystones of the main portico, each depicting a bust of Minerva, and they ordered two of them recarved to represent Juno and Mercury. Nothing was set in stone—even when it actually was set in stone.

The result is America’s finest classical revival building, and it is also our greatest civic building. Its grand Roman theme is not the customary masquerade that begins at the facade and ends distressingly at the lobby, but it carries lavishly through the entire building, without slackening or stinting. The visitor passes through its triumphal arch into Astor Hall, a vaulted room entirely built of marble—the largest such room in the world—and ascends by grand flights of stairs to arrive at the Rose Reading Room, a grand hall of 297 by 78 feet, a sumptuous chalice of stone, space, and light. This flawless sequence of spaces turns the walk to a table with a book into something akin to a Roman victory procession.

This splendid composition is routinely ascribed to Carrère and Hastings, but, strangely enough, it was not the work of an architect at all but the library’s first director, John Shaw Billings, that curious Gilded Age polymath. Billings was a twenty-three-old surgeon when the Civil War broke out, creating an inexhaustible demand for his services. His wartime experience included tending the wounded at Gettysburg—over fourteen thousand on the Union side alone. These experiences taught him to think of health in aggregate terms, in which the saving of lives by the tens of thousands was no longer a matter of individual skill but of logistics and the rational distribution of resources. In effect, he became America’s first public health expert, collecting vital statistics for the U.S. census and compiling a medical bibliography for the Surgeon General (then in the War Department). In 1875, he drew the plans for the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, then the country’s most scientifically advanced hospital.

When Billings was made the founding director of the New York Public Library in 1895, his first order of business was constructing its building. He proceeded from the odd premise that there was no essential difference in the layout of a hospital and a large well-planned library. In either instance, the task was to organize space rationally, provide for ample light and ventilation, and to move large numbers of people briskly and efficiently to their various destinations. He personally drew up a set of detailed plans for a building 350 by 225 feet, organized around two interior courtyards. Along the Fifth Avenue front he placed the building’s most public spaces—periodicals, the children’s library, exhibition spaces, and a painting gallery—while he placed the main reading room to the rear, above Bryant Park.

This was an inspired choice. The conventional solution would have been to sling the grand reading room prominently across the front of the building and to make it the crowning feature of the whole ensemble. So Charles McKim had done at the Boston Public Library, taking for his model the Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève in Paris, the prototype of all modern libraries. But Billings cared more for efficient movement than architectural pomp, and he placed his reading room directly over the stacks so that books could be delivered swiftly and silently by dumbwaiter. (Perhaps he still thought of his clients as medical patients, who would benefit by quiet restful surroundings, in which case Bryant Park was superior to bustling Fifth Avenue.)

As alumni of the École des Beaux Arts, Carrère and Hastings regarded the creation of an elegantly rational plan as the architect’s highest calling, and so it must have been vexing to be handed a predetermined layout, which they were expected to carry out and to make beautiful. And yet the division between Billings’s unsentimental and supremely rational floor plan and the architects’ sumptuous sculpting of space and surface gives the building a peculiar creative tension, without which it would be far less interesting.

It is this coherent unity—Billings’s seamless arrangement of reading room and book stacks—that the CLP now proposes to eradicate. It is not without its defenders. By far the most persuasive has been Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library as well as a trustee of the New York Public Library. In a series of pieces for The New York Review of Books, he points out that the library is cash-poor, with an endowment of only $830 million to maintain and staff its ninety-one facilities (by comparison, the endowment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is $2.7 billion). It must make up its annual budget of about $260 million from donations and city grants, which have been shrinking. But if it is cash-poor, the library is real estate–rich. By jettisoning two properties—one dilapidated and the other underused—the library could consolidate its operations in a stunning contemporary building.

To be sure, the book stacks have never been open to the public—they have been used solely for book storage and are seen only by librarians. Their removal will do nothing to compromise the visitor’s architectural experience of the building in the slightest. Or so we are told.

I n the breathless and upbeat public relations campaign on behalf of the CLP, everything is presented as an augmentation or enhancement of what the library already is and does. It is not stated, even obliquely or winkingly, that it represents a rethinking of the fundamental nature of a library. It would be better to acknowledge honestly that far more is at stake here than a bouquet of improvements in customer service. After all, Billings and his architects were well aware that their building was itself a bold and unflinching confrontation with the library-building type as it had swiftly evolved during the nineteenth century. Alas, so successfully did Carrère and Hastings carry out their Roman antique theme that it is generally assumed that the building itself was trapped in the past. Nothing could be further from the truth.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the library building type had achieved a coherent form: a longitudinal hall lined with books and arranged in alcoves with study desks, so that the books are at arm’s reach. Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence and Christopher Wren’s library at Trinity College in Cambridge codified the type. They might be small and personal, or lavish imperial extravaganzas, as at the Hofbibliothek in Vienna, but in all case they brought books and readers into intimate proximity with one another.

The Industrial Revolution shattered this with three technical innovations. In 1815, the London Times began printing with a steam printing press instead of the cumbersome hand-operated press. Shortly thereafter, the mechanical bookbinder came into general use, replacing the hand-stitching process that made the binding of a book as labor-intensive as the making of a shoe. And finally came the use of wood pulp for making paper rather than cotton rag. During the first half of the nineteenth century, these innovations helped to make books much cheaper, radically cheaper.

In the great libraries of the past, the books themselves were so rare and valuable that they were kept in sight and displayed as ornamental objects. The great Prunksaal of the Vienna library is in effect a secular sacristy of books. But cheap books were too common to be treated as precious rarities. In fact, they were now arriving so fast that the library itself was forced to operate in a different way. The principal problem was not how to display books but how to store, organize, and deliver them. There now occurred the great separation of books and their readers, between book stacks and reading rooms, which we take for granted as essential to the library but which in fact posed a crisis for the nineteenth century library, one which Billings, Carrère, and Hastings resolved with brilliance and imagination.

The CLP tacitly assumes that something similar has happened yet again, and that the digital revolution has in effect still further devalued its books. (Having been relegated to the stacks a century ago, they are now to be expelled from the building completely.) Yet it is by no means obvious why digital books must transform the physical logic of the library building, as cheap books once did. The content of digital books is transferred electronically through the air; the towers that transmit them do not need to be in the library, and neither do the readers who consult them (other than to see certain online journals that require expensive subscriptions). The library building—and particularly a research library, as this one is—will continue to serve in large measure as repositories for physical books, manuscripts, illustrations, and maps to which one is guided by the expert advice of reference librarians. The digital revolution has no more abolished the traditional library than the radio has abolished the concert hall, or the motion picture the theater. Two technological systems can exist side by side. (After all, no one proposed in 1923 that the Metropolitan Opera House should be cut in half to make room for radio listeners).

But it is not only the digitized books that will be stored off-site; Darnton tells us that librarians will also “cull through those volumes in order to select those that have never or rarely been consulted during the past decade.” This sounds innocuous, and for a circulating library it might make good sense, but not for a research library. Anyone who has ever conducted serious advanced research on a topic knows that new discoveries generally begin precisely at the point when he arrives at those books “that have never or rarely been consulted during the past decade.” One does not stock a research library as one stocks a supermarket; it is the aggregate of many single and unique items, perhaps used only once, that constitute its effectiveness.

To be sure, a book can be delivered within twenty-four hours, but to a researcher with limited time this can reduce the tempo of research to a crawl. It is generally the case that research advances by successive waves, the morning’s haul yielding clues for another cast of the net, and then another. It makes a good deal of difference if these successive searches are filled in twenty-four minutes or hours. How long, after all, of a research trip to New York can the typical non-resident scholar afford? And a research library with four million books at hand is considerably more than twice as good as one with two million.

E ven the use of digital books (which sometimes results in the discarding of the physical object, although not yet in New York) is not quite what it purports to be. In a fascinating 2002 essay on “The Social Life of Paper,” Malcolm Gladwell probed the limits of computer terminals when it came to processing complex information. His test case was the air traffic controller: if anybody would seem to benefit from a computer, it would be someone who needs to keep track of twenty-five converging flight paths at the same time. But air traffic controllers, to the alarm of anyone who has watched them, work primarily with slips of paper on which they pencil in new information and move around as the planes move. No computer system, with a flat, single set of readouts, can provide anything as flexible and three-dimensionally rich and tactile as the slips of paper, in which moving objects assume whole palaces of hierarchy.

For much the same reason, it is often necessary in research to consult simultaneously—and to compare side by side—a series of publications, something one cannot do with digital images. I once regularly had my students examine the effect of the Great Depression on American architecture, using the volumes of the Architectural Record from 1929 to 1933 as their source material. By placing the volumes on a table, one could trace the changing trajectories of layout, typography, subject matter, advertisements, even the quality of paper stock—trajectories as distinct as Gladwell’s flight paths. When the journal was digitized and the physical volumes made unavailable, I discovered the assignment no longer worked (and to tell them that the Depression caused a 90 percent drop in homebuilding is not quite the same thing.)

Anyone who has written and researched cheek by jowl with scholars from nineteen to ninety in a serious reading room—as one still does as the Bodleian Library or the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin—knows that one works differently when one reads, researches, and writes in public. I know no one who does not acknowledge he is more productive, more prolific, more energized by working side-by-side with others. It would be shocking if this were not so. There is the gregarious aspect of fruitful human activity. At the lowest level, it is the simple companionable aspect of a social animal, but when it is dignified by art and given shape by institutions, the social life becomes civic life. I suspect that there has not yet been research on this. A prediction: The productivity of scholars researching in quiet public spaces will be found to be significantly higher—hour for hour—than those working with the exact same resources at home.

I t is the combination of books and their users together, in a public setting, that makes this a civic building. And the neglect of this civic dimension is perhaps the most distressing aspect of the CLP. It is conspicuous that the guiding figure of the project was Marshall Rose, the chairman emeritus of the library and perhaps New York’s wealthiest real estate magnate. Fittingly, Rose seems to have conceived of the CLP in terms of an immense real estate operation—a bold sale of properties, the exploitation of a prime location with underperforming use (80,000 square feet on Fifth Avenue, prime Manhattan real estate used for—squandered on—book storage!), and finally a dazzling new project by a celebrity architect, in this instance one who specializes in dramatically impaling historical monuments.

Like many of our cultural institutions (one thinks of the Barnes Foundation), the New York Public Library seems fated to be a victim of what must be termed philanthropic tyranny: the willingness of an institution’s stewards to subordinate its long-term interests to the short-term interests of donors and charitable trusts. Those interests rarely go beyond the lifetimes of those who administer them, and in them a high-minded sense of obligation is often so tightly interplaited with considerations of prestige and careerism that they hardly can be recognized, let alone untangled.

But the cultural institution, and above all a library, must function on two entirely different timetables, on the clock and on the calendar. Even as it serves its daily readers, it holds its contents in trust for readers of the distant future. I think of that nameless librarian who long ago placed the papyrus scrolls containing the plays of Euripides in clay jars, arranging them alphabetically. Only one survived, that containing everything from E through K, from Elektra through Kyklops. We need to be grateful to him, and to all librarians who keep to their high calling of tending their clay jars, keeping them well ordered and dry, and storing them in the safest place possible: at the center of the civic life of the city they serve.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article stated that Stephen Schwarzman had an interest in the companies that bought the site of the former Donnell Library. This is not the case and the article has been updated accordingly.