New York Public Library Main Branch

Interesting facts

The lions were first nicknamed Leo Astor and Leo Lenox; Mayor Fiorello La Guardia renamed them Patience and Fortitude during the Great Depression.

The lions are carved from pink Tennessee marble; sculptor Edward Clark Potter received 8,000 dollars for the models and the Piccirillis 5,000 for the carving.

The building is assembled from about 20,000 numbered stone blocks, and around 65 per cent of the marble quarried for it was rejected.

Construction cost about 9 million dollars, far above the original estimate of 2.5 million.

About 250,000 people visited in the first week; the first book was delivered to a reader just seven minutes after being requested.

The underground stacks beneath Bryant Park, opened in 1991, hold 84 miles of shelving with room for some 3.2 million books.

Edwin Land researched the Polaroid camera here, and Chester Carlson studied photoconductivity here before inventing the Xerox copier.

The library holds the original stuffed toys that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh, acquired in 1987.

Architect John Carrère died a few months before the opening, and some 2,000 people filed past his coffin in the rotunda in March 1911.

Its Gutenberg Bible, the Lenox copy, was the first copy of that book ever acquired by an American.

Why it is worth it

The main building of the New York Public Library, officially the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building since 2008, occupies the stretch of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets in Midtown Manhattan. It was designed by the firm of Carrère and Hastings in the Beaux-Arts manner, clad in white Vermont marble, and opened on 23 May 1911 after more than a decade of work; the cornerstone had been laid in November 1902. The site itself has a past: the library stands where the Croton reservoir once held Manhattan's water supply, and Bryant Park opens directly behind it.

The institution it houses was born of a merger. In 1895 the Astor and Lenox libraries were combined, together with a large bequest from Samuel J. Tilden, into a single public library for the city, and this building was conceived as its flagship — a palace for books open to anyone who walked in. Its guardians are the two marble lions at the Fifth Avenue steps, Patience and Fortitude, carved by the Piccirilli family to models by Edward Clark Potter, and long since the library's emblem.

Inside, the procession is deliberate. Astor Hall, a vaulted marble entrance, leads to staircases and to the McGraw Rotunda, decorated with murals by Edward Laning. At the top is the Rose Main Reading Room, one of the great interiors of New York: about 297 feet long and 78 feet wide under a ceiling 52 feet high, its ceiling painted with murals by James Wall Finn. The collections run far beyond what is visible, including a Gutenberg Bible, and in 1991 new storage was dug beneath Bryant Park to hold them. The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965.

Getting there

The library stands on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, a few blocks east of Times Square. The subway stations at 42nd Street–Bryant Park and Fifth Avenue are next to it. The nearest airport is LaGuardia Airport (LGA), about 10 km away in a straight line.

From the encyclopaedia

The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building is the flagship building in the New York Public Library system in the Midtown neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The branch, one of four research libraries in the library system, has nine divisions. Four stories of the structure are open to the public. The main entrance steps are at Fifth Avenue at its intersection with East 41st Street. As of 2015, the branch contains an estimated 2.5 million volumes in its stacks. The building was declared a National Historic Landmark, a National Register of Historic Places site, and a New York City designated landmark in the 1960s.

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