Reading Publics by Tom Glynn

Author:Tom Glynn [Glynn, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), Language Arts & Disciplines, Library & Information Science, General
ISBN: 9780823262656
Google: KpOUDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Published: 2015-01-22T16:05:29+00:00

The Croton Reservoir (top, 1899) on Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue became the site of the Marble Palace for Booklovers, the New York Public Library’s Central Building (bottom, 1911).

In the contract between the Library and the City of New York, signed on December 8, 1897, the City agreed to raze the reservoir and construct an 87,500-square-foot building designed by an architectural firm selected by the Library’s board.58 The City also committed to maintaining the building and grounds. The structure itself cost slightly more than nine million dollars, while the annual maintenance averaged approximately thirty-six thousand dollars during the first five years that it was open.59 The City was not granted representation on the board. The New York Public Library agreed not only to make its reference collection freely accessible to the public, but also to operate a circulating library in the new building. Both collections were to be open evenings and on Sundays. Thus, even in this first phase of the founding, the creation of what became known as the Reference Department, there was a provision for circulation, even though the demand was clearly for branch libraries, and a centrally located collection could never bring books “within the reach of every man’s home.” In part, the trustees did it for the money. The City of New York would never have agreed to finance the new building without a circulating collection. On the other hand, as the Executive Committee of the board reported about the time that the City made its first appropriation for construction, the New York Public Library was prepared to “at least sympathize with the general public,” while “preserving the character of the Library as a library of reference.”60 The reservoir site, both geographically and in terms of public utility, was located somewhere between the free circulating libraries in lower Manhattan and the Lenox Library uptown, but rather closer to the latter.

. . .

Throughout the negotiations over the reservoir site, and particularly in their formal address to the mayor in 1896, the library trustees had publicly expressed their support for the ideals embodied in popular libraries. Once the City began construction of a magnificent reference library for scholars, there was a general expectation that the New York Public Library would absorb the various free circulating libraries into a comprehensive system embracing both reference and circulation. Yet for nearly two years after the contract for the Central Building was signed, neither the Public Library board nor the leaders of the smaller library associations took any definite steps toward consolidation. There were a variety of reasons on both sides for this initial hesitancy, but to a considerable extent both were torn between two central and, in this case, conflicting preoccupations of progressivism: a desire for efficiency and the fear of corruption. Everyone recognized that, despite the impressive statistics marshaled each year by the free circulating libraries, it was inefficient for so many different organizations to pursue the same goals in an uncoordinated fashion. It would be vastly more efficient and

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