Sunday Salon — Touring New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

Happy Holidays! We changed things up this year after our usual Christmas celebrations. We drove our NYC daughter home on Friday and stayed on to spend a holiday weekend in the city with her.

Months ago, when I was stuck at home, sick and feeling down, I planned out a packed weekend itinerary of free sightseeing and low-cost festive activities, saving most of the budget for trying out as many of the dedicated gluten-free restaurant and bar options as we could.

What with traffic in Connecticut and New York,  dropping off our bags at our daughter’s apartment, and then taking the subway, we had to skip plans for lunch and a walk through the south end of Central Park in order to head straight downtown to the iconic New York Public Library (the one with the lions out front). We had tickets for the free tour offered every Friday at 2 pm.

The Bryant Park Holiday Market (featuring an outdoor skating rink) was right outside the library, and the library itself was decorated, so we got a lot of holiday bang for zero bucks.

Building construction began in 1902 and the library was dedicated in 1911. In 1967, the library was designated a New York City Landmark.

The first stop on the tour was the main lobby where we entered the building. We learned that the interior design is Beaux-Arts and also that the original animals proposed for the statues in front of the library weren’t the lions, but beavers, in honor of one of the library’s founders, John Astor, who made his fortune in the fur trade.

I hope this website is reliable information, but I don’t have time to check it!

The next stop was the periodicals room. We were allowed to take pictures, but there was no talking in the room, even for the tour guide.

The last stop on the tour was the historic Rose Main Reading Room. There is no talking in this room, either; scholars and researchers used to use slips of paper to request books in the collection to be brought to them.

Of course, a substantial portion of the total collection has been digitized and can be accessed remotely now, so many of the up to 600 people who can use the room at a time are using it as a quiet workspace rather than a place to conduct research.

The stacks were, and still are, closed to the public; all the items in the collection are to be used only in the library. It is not a lending library.

After the tour, we spotted this Christmas-y exhibit on Charles Dickens. We had tickets for musical version of A Christmas Carol on Saturday night at Players Theatre in the West Village.

Although we saw the Lord Byron exhibition because it was at the end of the tour, we didn’t get to check out the library’s other current exhibits. But there was one on the history of Greenwich Village, where we were planning to spend a lot of time exploring on Saturday, and another on James Baldwin we would have gone to if we had gotten to start our day sooner. We had 5:15 timed entry tickets at the Whitney Museum of American Art for the museum’s weekly Free Friday Night, and we desperately needed to grab some food first at a place that was a safe dining option for our daughter with celiac disease.

Exhibitions | The New York Public Library

Sunday Salon is to encourage conversations about books and book-ish things. The weekly link-up and Facebook group are hosted by Deb Nance of Readerbuzz. Sunday Salon has a long history in the book blogging community, but it took me a long time to join in.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

6 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jeanne
6 days ago

How wonderful! Thanks for the photos.

mae
mae
6 days ago

The library tour sounds fabulous. So interesting.
Have a great New Year… mae at maefood.blogspot.com

Deb Nance at Readerbuzz

One of my favorite parts of visiting New York City in 2011 was visiting the public library. Here’s my Sunday Salon post from that visit, if you are interested: https://readerbuzz.blogspot.com/2011/08/sunday-salon-new-york-new-york.html

I’m glad you had such a wonderful time!

Sherry
5 days ago

Oh i do love a library, being a former librarian!
Happy new year
sherry

Helen Murdoch
5 days ago

What a wonderful trip! The NY Public Library is such a beautiful building; I didn’t realize you could do tours or that they don’t lend out books.

Jen at Introverted Reader

We visited the NYPL when we visited NYC this fall. It’s such a beautiful building. We didn’t take a tour though, so we didn’t have much context for what we were looking at. I loved the exhibit with a lot of old texts–a Gutenberg Bible, some Winnie-the-Pooh illustrations (I think), just a lot of amazing bookish artifacts. Happy New Year!

6
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x