THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

A Temple of Knowledge in the Heart of Manhattan

476 Fifth Avenue (Stephen A. Schwarzman Building), Midtown Manhattan, New York City Founded: May 23, 1895 · Main Building Opened: May 23, 1911 · Architect: Carrère & Hastings National Historic Landmark · New York City Designated Landmark · National Register of Historic Places

Introduction

On the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, flanked by two marble lions and looking out over the frenetic heart of Midtown Manhattan, the New York Public Library stands as one of the most remarkable public institutions ever created. It is simultaneously a monument of Beaux-Arts architecture, a treasury of civilization's most precious documents, a democratic refuge for scholars and schoolchildren alike, and the living symbol of a city's most generous impulse: to give the accumulated knowledge of the world, freely and unconditionally, to anyone who walks through the door.

Officially chartered as The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, the NYPL is, by almost any measure, the greatest public library system in the world. It encompasses 92 locations across Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Its total collection — spread across four major research libraries and 88 branch libraries — numbers more than 56 million items, making it the largest municipal library system on Earth. Its flagship building, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, houses nine research divisions, including eight special collections, in a structure of incomparable grandeur. And every single one of its resources is available, free of charge, to any person who holds a library card.

The historian David McCullough described the New York Public Library as one of the five most important libraries in the United States — alongside the Library of Congress and the university libraries of Harvard, Yale, and Boston. This is not hyperbole. The library holds a Gutenberg Bible, a handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson, the original stuffed animals that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh, a lock of Beethoven's hair, the only known letter from Christopher Columbus to King Ferdinand describing his discovery of the Americas, Shakespeare's First Folio, and the manuscripts of virtually every major American and British writer of the past two centuries. It also holds 700 cuneiform tablets, maps dating to the sixteenth century, 160 illuminated medieval manuscripts, and more than a petabyte of digital data.

Yet the New York Public Library is not only for scholars and researchers. It is where newly arrived immigrants come to learn English, where teenagers discover banned books, where unemployed New Yorkers practice for job interviews, where children meet Winnie-the-Pooh, and where the exhausted simply come to sit in one of the most beautiful rooms in the world and think. It is, in the most literal sense, the city's brain — and its most democratic institution.

Historical Origins: Three Libraries Become One

The Astor Library: New York's First Great Collection

The story of the New York Public Library begins not with a single founding act but with three separate institutional histories that converged, over the course of the nineteenth century, into one unprecedented enterprise.

The oldest of the three was the Astor Library, which owed its existence to one of the most consequential codicils ever added to a will. John Jacob Astor, the German-born fur trader and Manhattan real estate speculator who became the first American multimillionaire, was persuaded by Joseph Cogswell — a scholar and Harvard librarian — to dedicate a portion of his enormous fortune to the creation of a public library. Astor placed a codicil in his will bequeathing $400,000 (equivalent to nearly $15 million today) for this purpose. When Astor died in 1848, his trustees executed the bequest, constructing the Astor Library in 1854 in the East Village — one of the earliest public libraries in the United States.

The building, designed in the German Rundbogenstil style (a combination of Byzantine, Romanesque, and Renaissance forms popular in nineteenth-century Germany), reflected Astor's Central European origins. The library grew rapidly; by 1890 it held 260,000 volumes and was by far the largest collection in the New York metropolitan area. Extensions were added in 1859 and 1881. But for all its size, the Astor Library was not truly democratic: it was a reference library only, its books could not be borrowed, and access was restricted enough that a satirical illustration in Life magazine in 1884 jested at what exactly made a "public" library public.

The historic building that housed the Astor Library, after the library's merger into the NYPL, was later taken over by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and then, following a celebrated preservation battle of the 1960s, was repurposed as the permanent home of Joseph Papp's Public Theater — where it remains to this day, the oldest institutional predecessor of the NYPL now housing one of New York's most important performing arts organizations.

The Lenox Library: The Eccentric Collector

The second institution was the Lenox Library, the creation of one of the most eccentric figures in Gilded Age New York. James Lenox (1800–1880) inherited vast wealth from his father Robert, a Scottish immigrant who had become one of the most successful real estate investors in early nineteenth-century New York. James spent his life as a bibliophile of passionate intensity, assembling one of the most remarkable private collections in America.

Lenox's library was so personal and so jealously guarded that, before it opened to the public in 1870 in a purpose-built building on Fifth Avenue at 70th Street (designed by Richard Morris Hunt), access required individual application to the Superintendent of the Library — prompting the same Life satire to ask pointedly about the meaning of "public." Yet the collection itself was extraordinary. Lenox had acquired rare Americana, first editions of every conceivable significance, and in 1847, the first copy of the Gutenberg Bible ever brought to the Americas — a purchase that caused a sensation when announced, with some observers incredulous that such a treasure could have crossed the Atlantic. The Lenox Library also held the paintings and artifacts that would later form the basis of the Met's collection of Americana.

The Tilden Trust: Political Will for Public Good

The third strand came from a very different source. Samuel J. Tilden (1814–1886) was a New York lawyer and politician who had built his career on fighting corruption — most famously dismantling the Tweed Ring, the notoriously corrupt political machine that had plundered New York City for years. Tilden ran for President in 1876 and won the popular vote, only to lose the election in the deeply disputed Electoral College outcome that ended Reconstruction. His wealth came not from speculation or industry but from corporation law, making him a somewhat unusual figure among the Gilded Age plutocrats who were his contemporaries.

Tilden died in 1886, leaving $2.4 million in trust — the Tilden Trust — specifically for the creation and maintenance of a free library and reading room in the City of New York. The bequest was visionary; Tilden had seen with clarity that the city needed a great public library, and that private philanthropy was the only realistic mechanism for creating one at the necessary scale. However, the trust alone was insufficient to build and operate such an institution, and the trustees spent several years attempting to find a workable path forward.

The Merger of 1895: An Act of Unprecedented Philanthropy

The solution was elegantly simple in conception, though remarkable in practice: the three institutions — the Astor Library, the Lenox Library, and the Tilden Trust — would merge into a single, unified system. On May 23, 1895, in a historic agreement signed in New York City, the three institutions formally combined to create the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. The consolidation created a collection of approximately 350,000 items — a foundational endowment of immense scholarly value.

The 1895 date has a certain poetic symmetry: exactly sixteen years later, on May 23, 1911, the Main Branch would open its doors to the public.

The Carnegie Gift: Building a Democratic Network

While the founders were laying plans for a grand central library, the question of reaching ordinary New Yorkers across the five boroughs required a different kind of philanthropy. In 1901, Andrew Carnegie — the Scottish-born steel magnate who had become the wealthiest man in the world and the greatest institutional philanthropist in American history — agreed to donate $5.2 million (equivalent to over $160 million today) to construct 65 branch libraries across New York City. Carnegie's only condition was that the City provide the land and maintain the buildings once constructed.

The Carnegie branches transformed the NYPL from an elite research institution into a genuinely citywide democratic resource, bringing free books and learning to working-class neighborhoods across Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Many of these buildings, designed in consistent Beaux-Arts or Renaissance Revival styles, survive today as neighborhood landmarks — among the finest examples of institutional architecture in the outer boroughs. Carnegie's gift remains one of the most consequential acts of cultural philanthropy in American history.

The Site: Croton Reservoir to Beaux-Arts Palace

The Reservoir

The site chosen for the new central library was, in its own way, as historically significant as the institution it would house. Between 40th and 42nd Streets on Fifth Avenue stood the Croton Distributing Reservoir, a massive Egyptian Revival structure built in 1842 to receive water from the Croton Aqueduct that had been engineered to bring clean water to a city perpetually threatened by epidemic disease. Designed by James Renwick Sr. (father of the architect of St. Patrick's Cathedral), the reservoir resembled an Egyptian temple or fortress — massive granite walls fifty feet high, with a promenade along the top that had become one of New York's most popular public walks.

The reservoir was decommissioned in 1890 when the New York Public Library's planners successfully petitioned the State of New York, in 1897, for use of the site. Demolition of the reservoir began in 1899 and continued until 1900 — a genuine loss to architectural history, though the library that replaced it has more than justified the sacrifice. An original key to the Croton Reservoir is among the treasures now on display in the Polonsky Exhibition.

The site chosen had one crucial urban advantage: it was a double block stretching between 40th and 42nd Streets, with Bryant Park on its western half. This gave the library the extraordinary privilege of a long Fifth Avenue frontage with open parkland alongside — a rare "rift in the gridiron" of Manhattan that provided breathing room for one of the grandest facades in the city and the gracious steps that would become one of New York's most beloved public spaces.

The Design Competition

In 1897, the newly constituted New York Public Library held a design competition. The program was drafted with remarkable precision by Dr. John Shaw Billings, a physician, bibliographer, and the library's first director — a man whose intellectual gifts spanned medicine, engineering, and library science with unusual fluency. Billings called for a massive library with seven floors of book stacks topped by grand reading rooms, and devised a pioneering mechanical system of "dumbwaiters" (book lifts) to transport requested volumes from the stacks to the reading desks quickly and efficiently.

The competition was won by the architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings, in November 1897 — a relatively unknown practice at the time that had been recommended to the NYPL by the great Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White. The jury praised their entry as "distinctly the best of the designs submitted and of very exceptional merit." Construction began in 1900 and continued for eleven years, with the building finally opening on May 23, 1911.

Architecture: The Beaux-Arts Masterpiece

Carrère and Hastings

John Merven Carrère (1858–1911) and Thomas Hastings (1860–1929) were both Americans who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris — the supreme institution for architectural education in the nineteenth-century Western world. They had worked together in the office of McKim, Mead & White before establishing their own firm in 1885, and the New York Public Library commission, won in 1897, became both their greatest achievement and their most enduring monument. Carrère died in a tragic automobile accident in 1911, just weeks before the building he had devoted fourteen years to designing was opened. Hastings lived to see the building's full reception and continued practicing until his death in 1929.

Their Beaux-Arts design was, in the words of architecture critic Herbert Croly, writing in 1910 when the building was nearing completion, "essentially and frankly an instance of street architecture" — meaning a building designed not as a freestanding monument but as an active participant in the life of the city around it. This was both an observation and a compliment: the library was conceived as a civic space as much as an institutional one, its grand entrance steps an invitation to the public rather than a barrier.

The Exterior: Vermont Marble and Leonine Guardians

The building's exterior is clad entirely in Vermont Doyle marble — a warm, creamy white stone that glows in sunlight and ages with a dignified patina. The Fifth Avenue facade is a composition of extraordinary grandeur and discipline: a rusticated base supporting an upper story of colossal Corinthian columns, a central projecting pavilion with three great arched bays marking the primary entrance, and flanking wings that extend the composition in both directions.

The facade is animated by rich sculptural decoration. The entrance attic above the main portal carries allegorical figures representing Truth, Beauty, and Knowledge by sculptor Frederick MacMonnies. Flanking the main stairs are carved stone panels and flagpole bases of elaborate bronze. The building's corners are marked by sculptural groups that reinforce its civic dignity.

Most iconic of all are the two marble lions that flank the broad entrance staircase — perhaps the most recognized works of public sculpture in New York City. Carved from Tennessee pink marble by the Piccirilli Brothers (a family of Italian-American sculptors responsible for many of the city's greatest architectural sculptures) from models by sculptor Edward Clark Potter, the lions have stood guard over Fifth Avenue since the building's opening in 1911. Originally known as "Leo Astor" and "Leo Lenox" after the library's principal founding benefactors, the lions received their permanent nicknames in the 1930s from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who christened them Patience (on the south, left as you face the entrance) and Fortitude (on the north, right), invoking the qualities he felt New Yorkers would need to endure the Great Depression. The names have been inseparable from the lions — and from the city's identity — ever since.

The building measures 390 feet along Fifth Avenue and, with its back facing Bryant Park, creates one of the most dramatic architectural stage sets in the city. When the building was completed, the neighboring 40th and 42nd Street facades were designed as secondary elevations of considerable quality, with their own arched entrances and ornamental detail.

The Interior: Marble, Gold, and Painted Sky

The interior of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building is organized around a sequence of progressively more magnificent spaces, beginning with the entrance and culminating in the reading room at the building's summit. The circulation moves from the everyday toward the transcendent — from the mundane business of entering a building to the elevated experience of inhabiting one of the most beautiful rooms in the world.

Astor Hall

The main entrance leads directly into Astor Hall, a vaulted marble lobby of severe, classical elegance. Its floors, walls, and barrel-vaulted ceiling are all of white Tuckahoe marble, creating a monochromatic splendor that gives the impression of entering a Roman basilica or a great Renaissance cortile. The hall is deliberately austere — a cleansing of the city's noise and color that prepares the visitor for what lies above. Astor Hall, along with the first-through-third-floor stairs and the McGraw Rotunda, was designated a New York City interior landmark in 1974.

The Grand Staircase

From Astor Hall, the visitor ascends a broad marble staircase of exceptional quality. The stairs — flanked by carved stone balusters, lit by tall windows — rise through the building's principal levels with the measured ceremony appropriate to an institution of this importance. The staircase landings provide glimpses of the building's upper corridors and galleries, each decorated with different marble treatments and ornamental programs.

The McGraw Rotunda

On the third floor, the McGraw Rotunda (formerly the Central Hall) is the building's primary distribution space — a rectangular, barrel-vaulted hall that serves as the junction between the building's major public rooms. Despite its name, it is not a circular space but an elongated hall of considerable spatial drama. Its ceiling paintings and decorative plasterwork are among the building's finest ornamental elements. The rotunda provides access to the flanking galleries and reading rooms, and to the great room beyond.

The Bill Blass Public Catalog Room

Adjacent to the McGraw Rotunda is the Bill Blass Public Catalog Room — a grand, oak-paneled hall that serves as the primary point of access to the library's catalog systems. Originally designed as the Public Catalog room in 1911, it has been comprehensively restored, including a complete recreation of its ceiling mural (severely damaged during its first century of use) by EverGreene Architectural Arts. The mural, restored as part of the 2016 renovation, depicts allegorical figures of knowledge and learning in a richly colored Beaux-Arts style.

The Rose Main Reading Room

The Rose Main Reading Room is, without question, one of the most magnificent interior spaces in the United States and one of the great rooms of the world. Named for Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose, who funded a major restoration, it occupies the entire third floor of the building above the seven-story stack system — a deliberate placement by Dr. Billings to maximize light and air, and to keep the heavy weight of the stacks directly above the building's foundations.

The room's dimensions are staggering: 78 feet wide, 297 feet long (roughly the length of two city blocks), and 52 feet high from floor to ceiling. At the time of its opening in 1911, it was the largest uncolumned room in the United States — a vast, open floor of reading tables uninterrupted by any structural supports. The ceiling above is divided into vaulted bays, each painted with luminous sky murals of brilliant blues, creamy whites, and gilded clouds — an evocation of the heavens that transforms the act of reading into something approaching the sacred.

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The original furnishings included 42 long oak tables accommodating 636 readers simultaneously, with 40,000 reference volumes lining the walls on open shelves. The room's natural light enters through great arched windows on both the north and south walls, supplemented by elaborate bronze chandeliers and wall sconces of considerable beauty. The entire perimeter is lined with oak bookcases topped by carved cornices, creating an atmosphere of enclosed, concentrated richness.

Literary figures who worked in this room read as a roster of American intellectual life: Norman Mailer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, E.L. Doctorow (who researched Ragtime here), Alfred Kazin, Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, and Henry Miller, among countless others. Kazin described his youthful experience of the reading room in his memoir New York Jew with particular vividness: "There was something about the light falling through the great tall windows, the sun burning smooth the tops of the golden tables as if they had been freshly painted — that made me restless with the need to grab up every book, press into every single mind right there on the open shelves."

In May 2014, one of the decorative plaster rosettes fell from the ceiling to the floor, prompting the NYPL to close the room for an extensive $12 million restoration. The project, completed in 2016, not only repaired and reinforced the rosettes (securing them with steel cables), but also installed new LED lighting sympathetic to the original character, replaced the historic book-delivery system with modern "book trains," and restored the full magnificence of the decorative program. The restored Rose Main Reading Room and Bill Blass Public Catalog Room reopened on October 5, 2016. Both spaces were designated New York City Landmarks in 2017, following a four-year campaign.

The Book Stacks: Engineering a Library

Beneath the Rose Main Reading Room lies one of the most remarkable pieces of library engineering in history. The central stacks — seven stories of iron shelving descending deep into the building's core — have a nominal capacity of 3.5 million books on 88 miles of shelving, with marble floors and iron shelves set back from the windows that face Bryant Park. At the time of the building's opening, the stacks could hold 2.7 million books on 63.3 miles of shelves. An additional storage facility was constructed under adjacent Bryant Park in 1991, providing further expansion capacity.

The delivery system connecting the stacks to the reading rooms — originally a chain-and-lift conveyor that transported requested books in cylindrical carriers — was itself an engineering marvel, the product of Billings' systematic approach to library design. The modern replacement "book train" system operates on similar principles, delivering requested volumes from the stacks to the reading desks within minutes of a patron's request.

The Collections: 56 Million Items Spanning 4,000 Years

The New York Public Library's collections are organized across its four research libraries and 88 branch libraries, with the research collections representing some of the most significant accumulations of knowledge in any institution in the world.

The Nine Divisions of the Schwarzman Building

The main branch's nine divisions represent the core of the research collection. Eight of the nine are special collections — meaning they hold unique or rare materials not replicated elsewhere.

The General Research Division is the only non-special collection, occupying the Rose Main Reading Room and providing access to the library's core reference holdings of over 43 million items in more than 430 languages.

The Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History and Genealogy holds one of the largest genealogical collections in North America, including town records, state archives, and genealogies from around the world — a resource of incalculable value to the millions of Americans seeking to trace their origins.

The Map Division, created in 1898, holds over 20,000 atlases and 433,000 maps, some dating to the sixteenth century. It is one of the most comprehensive cartographic collections in the world, preserving the visual history of human understanding of geography across five centuries.

The Manuscripts and Archives Division comprises over 5,500 collections including 700 cuneiform tablets, 160 illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the personal papers of hundreds of major figures in American history, literature, and public life.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs holds the library's extraordinary collection of visual materials, including prints, drawings, photographs, and architectural records spanning the history of Western and non-Western visual culture.

The Music Division preserves scores, recordings, and musical manuscripts of great rarity and significance.

The Dorot Jewish Division, founded in 1897 from the original Astor and Lenox collections, is one of the most important collections of Judaica and Hebraica in any public institution, containing documents and books spanning centuries of Jewish intellectual and spiritual life.

The Rare Books Division and the Berg Collection of English and American Literature together constitute one of the most significant concentrations of literary manuscripts and rare books in the United States.

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The Berg Collection: Literature's Greatest Archive

The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature is, by universal agreement among scholars of English-language literature, the finest collection of literary manuscripts and rare books in the world. Assembled by the Berg brothers — both physicians and passionate bibliophiles — and donated to the library in 1940, the collection has been continuously expanded and now encompasses the manuscripts, letters, notebooks, and personal libraries of virtually every major British and American writer of the past three centuries.

The holdings include:

• The world's largest collection of Virginia Woolf manuscripts — including her diaries, notebooks, and holograph drafts of major works — as well as her walking stick, displayed in the Polonsky Exhibition
• Charles Dickens's writing desk and his personal, annotated copy of A Christmas Carol used for his famous public readings
• Manuscripts by T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Maya Angelou, Mary Shelley, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and hundreds of other major figures
• Thomas Hardy's personal library and papers
• Henry James's correspondence and drafts

The Polonsky Exhibition: Treasures Made Public

For most of its history, the extraordinary material treasures of the New York Public Library were accessible only to qualified researchers — a paradox for an institution founded on democratic principles. In September 2021, this changed permanently with the opening of the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library's Treasures, the first-ever permanent exhibition in the library system, funded by a $12 million gift from philanthropist Dr. Leonard Polonsky CBE and The Polonsky Foundation. The exhibition is housed in the Gottesman Hall, a 6,400-square-foot marble exhibition space on the building's first floor.

Divided into nine thematic sections — Beginnings, Performance, Explorations, Fortitude, The Written Word, The Visual World, Childhood, Belief, and New York City — the exhibition rotates items from the library's collections while maintaining certain iconic objects on long-term display. Among the most significant items on permanent or rotating display:

• Thomas Jefferson's handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence — one of only six manuscript versions of the document in existence, including text that was later deleted, notably Jefferson's criticism of slavery
• The original Bill of Rights (1789) — one of the founding documents of American democracy
• George Washington's handwritten Farewell Address
• A Gutenberg Bible (printed c. 1455) — the copy acquired by James Lenox in 1847, the first ever brought to the Americas, and a foundational work in the history of mass communication
• The original Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animals — the bear, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger belonging to Christopher Robin Milne, donated to the library in 1987 at Christopher Robin's own request, so that they could be enjoyed by as many children as possible
• Shakespeare's First Folio (1623) — one of fewer than 240 surviving copies of the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays
• The only known letter from Christopher Columbus to King Ferdinand describing his discovery of the Americas
• A Sumerian cuneiform tablet dating to approximately 2300 BCE — one of the earliest examples of written language in the collection
• Malcolm X's briefcase
• A lock of Beethoven's hair and his sketches for the Archduke Trio
• Virginia Woolf's walking stick
• Charles Dickens's writing desk
• An original key to the Croton Reservoir — the site on which the library now stands
• P.L. Travers's umbrella — belonging to the author of Mary Poppins

The Polonsky Exhibition is free and open to the public, making objects of incalculable historical value accessible to every visitor, from toddlers to scholars, without charge or credential.

The Research Libraries: Beyond the Main Branch

The NYPL's research functions extend well beyond the Schwarzman Building, encompassing three further institutions of major importance.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard between West 135th and 136th Streets in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is one of the most important cultural institutions in the African diaspora — a library, archive, and cultural center of global significance dedicated to the history, culture, and experience of people of African descent.

The Schomburg Center traces its origins to 1925, when the 135th Street Branch of the NYPL established a Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints — a response to the demand, identified by branch librarian Ernestine Rose, for books by and about Black people. In 1926, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg — an Afro-Puerto Rican scholar and passionate collector of Black history and culture — agreed to sell his collection to the library when the Carnegie Foundation paid $10,000 for it and donated the books to the NYPL. Schomburg, who insisted that the collection remain in Harlem, became the first curator of his own collection in 1932, until his death in 1938.

The Schomburg Center is named in his honor. By 2010, the collection had grown to 10 million objects, organized across five divisions: the Art and Artifacts Division, the Jean Blackwell Hutson General Research and Reference Division, the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division, and the Photographs and Prints Division. Among its most significant holdings is a signed first edition of a book of poems by Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American published poet. The Schomburg Center was designated a research library of the NYPL in 1972 and has been recognized as the most prestigious collection of African-American materials in the country.

In 2025, the NYPL hosted events celebrating the centennial of the Schomburg Collection, honoring a century of preserving and sharing the cultural heritage of the African diaspora.

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Located at Lincoln Center at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (officially the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center) is the world's most comprehensive library dedicated to the arts of music, theater, and dance. Its collections include performing scores, recordings, photographs, programs, playbills, and the personal papers of major figures in every branch of the performing arts. As a circulating as well as a research library, it serves both scholars and practitioners, providing working musicians, actors, directors, and choreographers with access to materials unavailable anywhere else.

The library's holdings complement the great institutions of Lincoln Center itself, creating a unique concentration of performing arts resources in a single complex.

The Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL)

The Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) opened in 1996 in the centenary year of the NYPL's founding, in the former B. Altman & Company Building on 34th Street. Designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, the $100 million project created a modern, technology-forward research facility serving New York's enormous business and scientific communities. SIBL provides access to technical and scientific databases, business records, patent information, and the full range of scientific periodical literature, complementing the humanities and social science emphasis of the Schwarzman Building.

Notable People, Writers, and Cultural Connections

The New York Public Library's relationship with writers, thinkers, and cultural figures is among the richest of any institution in the city. The library has been a resource, a sanctuary, and a creative catalyst for generations of New Yorkers who shaped American intellectual and artistic life.

Among those who have cited the library as a formative influence or used it as a primary research resource:

• E.L. Doctorow — researched Ragtime in the Rose Main Reading Room, using the library's historical collections to reconstruct the texture of turn-of-the-century New York
• Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Alfred Kazin, and Isaac Bashevis Singer — all cited the library as a central resource in their intellectual and creative lives
• Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou — Hughes was particularly associated with the Schomburg Center, which was a vital institution for the Harlem Renaissance and its aftermath
• Chester Himes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin — all made use of the Schomburg Center's collections
• Jack Kerouac, whose manuscript materials are in the Berg Collection
• Virginia Woolf, whose papers are held in the Berg Collection — the largest Woolf archive in the world

The library has also been the site of significant public cultural events, from major author readings and lectures to exhibitions drawing audiences from across the city and beyond.

Popular Culture and the Library as Icon

Few institutions in New York have appeared as consistently in popular culture as the NYPL — a testament to its place in the city's collective consciousness as a symbol of knowledge, democracy, and civic grandeur.

In Film

The Schwarzman Building has appeared as a setting in dozens of films. Among the most notable:

• The Day After Tomorrow (2004) — in which the library becomes a refuge from a global climate catastrophe, with characters burning books to survive
• Ghostbusters (1984) — the opening sequence, in which the ghostbusters encounter the terrifying "Library Ghost" in the main stacks, introduced the building to a generation of children
• Spider-Man (2002) — the library appears in background shots of the New York skyline
• Sex and the City — the library's steps and interior appear multiple times

On Television

The building and its collections have been referenced in episodes of Seinfeld ("The Library," in which Jerry is tracked down by a librarian for a book he allegedly never returned), Carl Sagan's Cosmos series, and numerous other programs.

In Literature

The library has inspired an extraordinary range of literary tributes. E.B. White wrote "A Library Lion Speaks" and "Reading Room" as part of his Poems and Sketches. Richard Eberhart wrote "Reading Room, The New York Public Library" in Collected Poems. Lawrence Ferlinghetti composed "Library Scene, Manhattan." Alfred Kazin, Henry Miller, and Kate Simon all wrote movingly about the library in personal essays collected in the anthology Reading Rooms (1991).

The building also appears in Lawrence Blochman's mystery novel Death Walks in Marble Halls (1942) — its title referring to the library's interior.

Landmark Status and Preservation

The New York Public Library's main building has received the most comprehensive suite of landmark protections available to any structure in the United States:

• 1965 — Declared a National Historic Landmark by the Secretary of the Interior
• 1966 — Listed on the National Register of Historic Places
• 1967 — Designated a New York City Landmark by the Landmarks Preservation Commission
• 1974 — Astor Hall, the first-through-third-floor stairs, and the McGraw Rotunda designated as New York City Interior Landmarks
• 2017 — The Rose Main Reading Room and the Bill Blass Public Catalog Room designated as New York City Interior Landmarks, following a four-year advocacy campaign — a recognition of the exceptional cultural significance of these spaces

The Library System Today: 92 Locations Serving All New Yorkers

Scale and Scope

The contemporary NYPL is a system of extraordinary scale: 92 locations across Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, including four research libraries and 88 branch libraries. With more than 56 million items in its total holdings, it is the largest municipal library system in the world. The four research libraries — the Schwarzman Building, the Schomburg Center, the Library for the Performing Arts, and SIBL — hold the system's irreplaceable special collections. The branch libraries serve as neighborhood anchors across the three boroughs.

The Carnegie Branches: Architectural Heritage

Of the 65 branch libraries originally constructed with Carnegie's 1901 gift, many survive today as some of the finest examples of early-twentieth-century institutional architecture in New York. Their consistent quality — most designed in Beaux-Arts or Classical Revival styles by architects working to Carnegie Library guidelines — gives the branch library system a recognizable architectural identity that connects it visually to the grandeur of the main building.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL)

The former Mid-Manhattan Branch at 455 Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from the main building, was substantially renovated and reopened in 2021 as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library — a modern circulating library serving Midtown Manhattan, with open stacks, collaborative study spaces, and an extensive collection of circulating materials available for borrowing.

Community Services: The Library as Social Infrastructure

The contemporary NYPL functions not only as a repository of books and knowledge but as a piece of essential social infrastructure for New York City. At its branches, New Yorkers can:

• Apply for New York City ID cards
• Access social work services and mental health referrals
• Take English language classes and prepare for citizenship tests
• Practice for job interviews and prepare resumes
• Access legal clinics and consumer protection advice
• Participate in after-school programs for children and teenagers
• Use free Wi-Fi and public computer terminals
• Participate in the Teen Banned Book Club and the Books for All program, which makes books banned elsewhere in the United States available to any American through the SimplyE app

This breadth of social services reflects the library's understanding of its role in a city of extraordinary diversity and inequality — a public institution committed to meeting its communities where they are.

Digital Collections and Open Access

The NYPL has been a leader in digital access among major research institutions. In 2017, it released over 375,000 high-resolution images from its collections into the public domain — a landmark open-access decision that has since resulted in over 1.2 billion image views and 7 million downloads. The library's digital holdings total more than a petabyte of data. Cardholders have free access from home to thousands of databases, periodicals, and e-books through platforms including EBSCOhost, Gale, and the SimplyE app.

The NYPL was a founding member of the Research Libraries Group alongside Columbia, Harvard, and Yale Libraries, and is a member of the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP), sharing an off-site shelving facility in Plainsboro, New Jersey with Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia — a partnership that allows the library to maintain vast collections while managing the physical constraints of its Midtown building.

Controversies and Debates

The Central Library Plan

The most significant controversy in the NYPL's recent history was the Central Library Plan, proposed around 2011–2012 by library president Tony Marx. The plan proposed to demolish the seven-story central stacks beneath the Rose Main Reading Room and move the circulating collection from the Mid-Manhattan Branch into the main building, effectively converting the Schwarzman Building from a pure research library into a combined research-and-circulating institution. Critics — including many prominent scholars, architects, and public figures — argued vigorously that the plan would destroy an irreplaceable piece of architectural and engineering history, compromise the research function of the building, and fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of a great research library. After sustained public opposition, the plan was abandoned in 2014.

Collections Access

The library's decision to move a significant portion of its circulating collection to off-site storage in Plainsboro, New Jersey, has drawn criticism from researchers who find the three-to-five-day retrieval time for some materials incompatible with serious scholarly work. The tension between the need to maintain large physical collections in a city where space is extraordinarily expensive, and the expectation of on-demand access among researchers, remains an ongoing institutional challenge.

The Stephen A. Schwarzman Renovation

In 2008, businessman and private equity executive Stephen A. Schwarzman donated $100 million toward the renovation and expansion of the main building — the largest single gift in the NYPL's history. As a condition of the gift, the building was renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. British architect Norman Foster was appointed to design the renovation program.

The renovation has proceeded in phases. The major restoration of the Rose Main Reading Room and Bill Blass Public Catalog Room was completed in 2016 at a cost of $12 million (from a separate donor). The 40th Street entrance was opened to the public in June 2023, along with a new public plaza, café, restrooms, elevator, and visitor center — the first major improvements to the building's public accessibility in decades. The Schwarzman Building continues to undergo ongoing renovation work.

Key Facts and Statistics

Detail

Information

Full official name

The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Common name

The New York Public Library (NYPL)

Main building name

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

Address

476 Fifth Avenue (at 42nd Street), Midtown Manhattan, NYC

Founded

May 23, 1895

Main building opened

May 23, 1911

Architect

Carrère and Hastings (John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings)

Building style

Beaux-Arts

Exterior material

Vermont Doyle marble

Lion sculptors

Piccirilli Brothers (from models by Edward Clark Potter)

Lion names

Patience (south) and Fortitude (north); named by Mayor La Guardia, 1930s

Rose Main Reading Room dimensions

78 ft wide × 297 ft long × 52 ft high

Stack capacity

3.5 million books; 88 miles of shelving

Total system locations

92 (4 research libraries + 88 branches)

Total collection

56+ million items

Boroughs served

Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island

National Historic Landmark

1965

National Register of Historic Places

1966

NYC Landmark (exterior)

1967

NYC Interior Landmarks

Astor Hall, stairs, McGraw Rotunda (1974); Rose Main Reading Room, Bill Blass Catalog Room (2017)

Original site

Croton Distributing Reservoir (decommissioned 1890, demolished 1899–1900)

Carnegie gift (1901)

$5.2 million for 65 branch libraries

Schwarzman gift (2008)

$100 million for renovation

Polonsky Exhibition opened

September 24, 2021

First Director

Dr. John Shaw Billings

Digital collection

1+ petabyte of data; 375,000+ open-access images

Conclusion: Democracy's Library

The New York Public Library embodies a proposition that was, when the library was founded in 1895, bold and not universally accepted: that knowledge is not a privilege but a right, that the great libraries of civilization should belong not to the wealthy few but to every citizen, and that a free society can only flourish when its people have access to information, ideas, and the accumulated wisdom of the past.

The men who founded it — the lawyer John Jay dreaming of a national institution over Fourth of July dinner in Paris; the governor Samuel Tilden, a lifetime enemy of corruption, leaving his fortune for the public good; the librarian Joseph Cogswell persuading the miserly John Jacob Astor to part with $400,000 for books; the eccentric bibliophile James Lenox carrying the first Gutenberg Bible across the Atlantic — were building something larger than a library. They were building an argument about what a civilized society owes its members.

That argument has been extended and deepened by every generation since. Andrew Carnegie's branches brought it to the neighborhoods. The Schomburg Center brought it to Harlem and the African diaspora. The Polonsky Exhibition brought it to anyone who has ever wanted to see Jefferson's handwriting, touch history, or watch a child discover Winnie-the-Pooh. The digital collections have brought it to more than a billion people worldwide.

When Alfred Kazin described the feeling of sitting in the Rose Main Reading Room as a young man — "the sun burning smooth the tops of the golden tables" — he was describing something that remains available today to every New Yorker, at no charge, every day the library is open. The lions are still there. The books are still below. The painted sky still arches overhead. And the door is still open to everyone.

"The New York Public Library has been an essential provider of free books, information, ideas, and education for all New Yorkers for more than 100 years." — New York Public Library mission statement

476 Fifth Avenue · New York, NY 10018 · Founded 1895 · National Historic Landmark · nypl.org