The library was first quartered in City Hall, at Wall and Broad Streets, and it often claims to have been the first library of Congress, as congressmen borrowed its books when New York was the nation’s capital, from 1789 to 1790. Although Columbia College was also founded in 1754, I have discovered no other library, museum or similar organization predating this peculiar institution.

Image The interior of the library today. Credit... Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

By the mid-19th century the library flowered into a full-fledged literary organization, with lectures by Poe, Emerson and others, and in 1856 put up a new home on University Place, then a smart residential address.

The new building had a double-height central reading room, flanked by alcoves with space for 100,000 books. In an address that year the librarian, John MacMullen, envisioned a great future for the library with “an ample Reading-Room, whither the Telegraph, on lightning wings, concentrates intelligence from all quarters of the world.” He was fired a few months later, after two years on the job.

Members began moving uptown and having their books delivered, and the library’s literary aspirations faded. In 1937 it relocated to its present 1917 town house on East 79th Street, after shelves were installed in the gutted shell of the back half. That was the institution guarded by Miss Ruskell when I arrived, a wonderful but musty book-lending operation for polite private school families, although anyone could come to the first-floor reference room and consult any book.

From 1997 to 2005, I served as a trustee, and began to explore the library with a proprietary interest. On the top floor, in the art book stacks, I found the remains of a small skylight for an interior room where during the building’s residential years the footman had cleaned riding boots.