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New York - New York City - The New York Public Library Thousands of readers and visitors, on an average day, enter the Fifth Avenue building of the New York Public Library. Here is the center of a library system which, exclusive of separate systems in Brooklyn and Queens, is second in size in America only to the Library of Congress. In the reference department, which occupies the greater part of this building, eighty miles of shelves are crowded with more than two and one-half million books. Approximately a million and one-half books more are available through the Circulation Department, which comprises fifty-one branches and eleven subbranches in Manhattan, Richmond, and the Bronx. The library's collections are strong in history and biography, especially in relation to America; supplementing tens of thousands of books in the Americana collections are thousands of prints and etchings, and scores of valuable documents and maps dealing with the nation's history. The building, which occupies the site of the old Croton Reservoir, was designed by the firm of Carrère and Hastings, architects, and completed in 1911. It cost $9,000,000. Architecturally, it is an outstanding example of the eclectic neoclassic style that was popular following the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. The building has been much criticized for lack of functional expression, overabundant detail, and the sacrifice of utilitarian values for the sake of appearance. Nonetheless, it fully justifies the pride of its generation, for it was and still is a magnificent civic monument. Its huge substantial bulk of white Vermont marble, ornately decorated, darkened by the weathering of time and thereby made to seem more massive, commands attention even on Fifth Avenue, bordered as it now is with new, spectacular architecture. The library developed from the consolidation of the Astor and Lenox libraries and the Tilden Trust, effected in 1895. This great institution was built as much by the devotion of the people who fought for free libraries in the face of general indifference as by generous gifts. James Green Cogswell, a teacher, persuaded the first John Jacob Astor that a "fitting testimonial to his adopted country by its richest citizen" should be a library. (A huke monument to Washington had been favored for a time.) In 1848 the schoolmaster who "had stayed at the old gentleman's elbow to push him on" had his reward. Astor, in his will, gave $400,000 and a plot of land to the city for a library, and accordingly a reference library was opened in 1854 on Lafayette Place. Together with books and bequests by members of the Astor family, it represents a total of $1,000,000. The Lenox Library, opened in 1875, was founded by James Lenox, book lover and scholar; at the time of consolidation, it contained 85,000 volumes and had an endowment fund of $505,000. Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York in 1874 and Democratic candidate for President in 1876, died in 1886 and left his money for a free library and reading room. The Tildren Trust brought an endowment of $2,000,000, after the original bequest of about $4,000,000 had been reduced by a successful contesting of the Tilden will. Thomas Hastings, of the firm of Carrère and Hastings, was never completely satisfied with the Fifth Avenue front, and made numerous studies for its alteration. His widow provided in her will a sum of money which might be applied to the cost of alterations. The west, or rear, elevation is artistically beyond criticism even from the functionalist standpoint; tall narrow windows, lighting the seven floors of stacks within, extend all the way to the large windows of the reading rooms in the attic story, forming a façade that is truthfully and skillfully handled. A long forecourt, extending the full length of the Fifth Avenue side, has become familiar throughout the nation as a meeting place for all classes. A few broad steps flanked by E. C. Potter's famous couchant lions lead to a raised, pigeon-inhabited walk, separated from the street by a stone parapet. For more than a generation this place has attracted tourists, eccentrics, lovers, visiting celebrities, and itinerant intellectuals from the farthest corners of the country. The façade is dominated by a central pavilion with a triple-arched deepset portico and coupled Corinthian columns. Surmounting the colonnade is an attic parapet embellished with six vigorously modeled figures, by Paul W. Bartlett, representing History, Drama, Poetry, Religion, Romance, and Philosophy. The fountain figures in wall niches on either side of the portico, by Frederick MacMonnies, represent Truth and Beauty. The grotesque sculptural groups in the pedimented end pavilions, by George Gray Barnard, represent History and Art. The entrance from Fifth Avenue leads into a two-story vestibule with a vaulted ceiling of veined white Vermont marble and wide stairways on opposite sides of the hall. The effect is impressive and cold, but the scene is humanized by the busy information desk facing the entrance, and by the activities of those who use the hall (with its four marble benches) as a meeting place. The immense size of the entrance hall, the elaborate series of stairways, the wide corridors, the vistas of columns and vaulting, may seem improvident in view of a relative shortage of actual library space. But the library is more than a place for the study of books; in effect it is a center of the city's intellectual life, and the monumental character of its design is, therefore, appropriate. The Lenox Library had been intended for scholars rather than for popular use. In the 1880's the experience of the Astor and Lenox libraries made it seem foolhardy to expect that public libraries would be supported, and with the establishment of the Tilden Fund a consolidation with the Astor and Lenox libraries was sought. Meanwhile, women of the Grace Episcopal Church, adopting a different approach, had collected 500 books and obtained a room on Thirteenth Street for a popular library. Readers, no longer overawed by the magnificence of the earlier institutions -- the Astor Library, for instance, had liveried doormen -- came in such numbers that the sidewalks were blocked during the two hours once a week when the library was open. Such libraries soon were established in other neighborhoods, and in 1887 they were united as the New York Free Circulating Library, and financial help was given by the city. In order to benefit from a $5,200,000 gift made by Andrew Carnegie to the city for library buildings, the New York Free Circulating Library with eleven branches joined the Astor-Lenox-Tilden consolidation in 1900, and still later, nine other independent libraries were united with it. Thus began the New York Public Library's Circulation Department. Stone Lions on Fifth Avenue Entrance to the New York Library, New York City, New York, USA Framed Photographic Print Buy at AllPosters.com Public Library, New York City Pre-Matted Print Buy at AllPosters.com