One enters the NYPL and sees this huge marble lobby called Astor Hall (in fact, NYPL was the largest all-marble building ever built in the US). Of course, we have a security checkpoint. Will we ever return to those simpler days when your bags only got checked when you left a library?
Keeping with the Beaux-Arts tradition, Astor Hall provides a massive entrance: 37 feet high, with a 76' by 47' footprint with grand staircases at either end. Here's another shot of the entrance hall. Note Beaux-Arts framing of the window with columns. Through the window, you see the other side of Fifth Avenue.
The first floor also contains the Dewitt Wallace Reading Room, one of 11 reading rooms, this one named after the Readers' Digest founder. Wallace used this spot to condense some of the 11,000 periodicals now available in this room. He then mailed out the first issues from his apartment in Greenwich Village before moving production to Pleasantville. (No one would ever call NYC that!) Jane demonstrates the mirror sheen on the marble at the elbow of this "L" shaped room. Murals of various New York publisher's buildings adorn the walls.
What is most impressive about NYPL is what you don't see: the Stacks. We took the picture below through a window. Books are stored by height making the common library classification systems such as Library-of-Congress or Dewey Decimal infeasible: NYPL has its own proprietary system which allows them to squeeze more (and homogenously sized) books onto their 88 miles of shelves on 8 floors where sometimes they actually hold up the library with weight-bearing shelves. During the 1980s, the stacks were extended with an additional 44 miles of shelving underneath Bryant Park. Check out some of the detail on the vertical shelving and banister even though these were never meant to be in public view.
NYPL is probably best known for the third floor reading room which spans the length of nearly two city blocks, one of the worlds largest spaces without columns. Technically it's one room, but practically is two, separated in the middle by a wood-framed distribution point where personnel called "pages" dispense books sent through pneumatic tubes from the stacks below. Pages wear roller skates only in Coppolla movies. Space is available here for over 600 readers (about 1 for every 80,000 books in the stacks which cannot be taken out of the library). Over 25,000 reference works such as encyclopedias line the perimeter.
The Rose Reading Room ($15 million naming rights to the real estate developer and NYPL trustee who funded the restoration) was restored in 1988 including removing remnants of WWII blackout paint from the windows. Unfortunately the ceiling murals could not be saved. (Actually, restorers didn't try -- they considered them to be decorative, not fine, art.) Instead new clouds were painted after studying classic skies painted by the three "T"s: Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Turner. In the picture below, you can also see 2 of the 18 chandeliers.
Here's what pedestals look like on the 42 oak reading tables after being stripped and refinished in the 1988 renovation: Nice touch! The renovation also wired most of the tables with sixteen data ports and electricity for those who dock their laptops. (Shared terminals are also available with access to the catalogue and the internet).
