New York Public Library

The New York Public Library’s building on Fifth Avenue was planned around one room. John Shaw Billings, the library’s first director, sketched a vast reading room set on top of seven floors of stacks, with the fastest possible route from shelf to reader. Carrère and Hastings, a little-known firm, won the 1897 competition from 88 entries and built that idea in white marble.

The library was new as well. It was formed in 1895 by merging the Astor and Lenox Libraries, with a bequest from Samuel J. Tilden. The city gave it the site of the old Croton Reservoir, and its floor had to be broken with dynamite. The building opened on 23 May 1911, then the largest marble structure in the United States. It now carries the name of Stephen A. Schwarzman, whose $100 million gift helped pay for a restoration finished in 2011.

The Rose Main Reading Room is 91 metres long and 24 wide, under a ceiling 16 metres high with no columns to hold it up. A delivery desk divides it into two halls. Readers ask for books from the closed stacks, and the books come to a numbered seat. On the first public day, the first book delivered reached a reader seven minutes after he filed his slip at 9:08 a.m. Since 2016 small red carts, the “book train”, bring them from stacks under Bryant Park. When the Public Catalog Room next door was restored in the 1980s, ten million worn cards were replaced with photocopies: the paper form of a library catalogue.

Outside, two lions of Tennessee marble flank the steps. In the 1930s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia named them Patience and Fortitude, the qualities he thought New Yorkers would need to get through the Depression. The room belongs with the great reading rooms in our tour of beautiful libraries around the world.