| Initial designs for the project by world-renowned architecture firm Foster + Partners were unveiled and reveal a spectacular circulating library with views of Bryant Park, offering New Yorkers 100,000 square feet of books, computers, classrooms, programming spaces, quiet study zones, and more. |
|
|
|
|
|
Library patrons will enjoy never-before-seen views of Bryant Park in a modern and light-filled new lending library inside our 42nd Street location.
|
|
|
|
|
Dear Subscriber,
The New York Public Library invites you to take a first-ever look at the inspiring new lending library that will be constructed for the public inside of our historic building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
Initial designs for the project by world-renowned architecture firm Foster + Partners were unveiled today and reveal a spectacular circulating library with views of Bryant Park, offering New Yorkers 100,000 square feet of books, computers, classrooms, programming spaces, quiet study zones, job search resources, and more, free and open to all. The new library will also include an expanded children's center and a new teen center.
This is the Central Library Plan, NYPL's ambitious project to imagine and then build a center of inspiration for all in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. Under the plan, the collections and services now found at the popular but severely deteriorated Mid-Manhattan Library and the innovative Science, Industry and Business Library will be incorporated into our landmark 42nd Street building, bringing New Yorkers all of the services they need, want, and love in one central location, while preserving the building's historic public spaces and enhancing research services for scholars, writers, and students.
The plan's benefits include:
- Creating a new central branch that will be open 7 days a week, 12+ hours a day (most days)
- Replacing the Mid-Manhattan Library, which is too outdated to serve a 21st-century public, giving New Yorkers the modern main lending library they have long deserved
- Creating more public library space than currently exists in all three of our Midtown locations combined
- More than doubling public space within the 42nd Street building
- Refurbishing long-closed rooms to their former glory and reopening them to the public, freeing up more of Carrère and Hastings's Beaux-Arts masterpiece for the use of the people
- Bringing a world-class circulating collection (books, DVDs, CDs, audiobooks, and more) into the building for the first time in many generations
- Views of Bryant Park
- Preserving the Schwarzman Building's awe-inspiring public spaces, including the Rose Main Reading Room and Astor Hall, which will not be touched
In addition, with the Central Library Plan, our core research materials will now be housed more securely, preserving them for future generations of scholars, writers, and students. Currently, research volumes are stored in 101-year-old book stacks that lack climate controls and other safeguards, putting the collections at risk. Under the plan, the technologically outdated bookshelves, which have always been closed to the public, will be removed, and the materials rehoused in modern storage underneath Bryant Park. The enormous space where the stacks are situated today will become a vast, light-filled lending library. The books get proper storage. The people get views of Bryant Park and light. Everybody wins. Portions of the historic book stacks will be repurposed in the new circulating
library, allowing the public to see and enjoy them for the first time.
We encourage you to learn more about the Central Library Plan at our new website, and to visit the free exhibition on the plan, opening this month in Astor Hall in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.
From the beginning, the 42nd Street building was always meant to serve the needs of all the people, from researchers and scholars to toddlers and teens. With the Central Library Plan, that's exactly what we're doing - once again, our iconic Fifth Avenue building will truly be "The People's Palace."
Tony Marx
President and CEO
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Section through the 42nd Street building, showing the dynamic new circulating library beneath the third floor research spaces; two stories of modern book storage underneath Bryant Park will preserve the Library's research collections.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| The New York Public Library | Stephen A. Schwarzman Building | Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street | New York, NY 10018 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Library patrons will enjoy never-before-seen views of Bryant Park in a modern and light-filled new lending library inside our 42nd Street location.
Section through the 42nd Street building, showing the dynamic new circulating library beneath the third floor research spaces; two stories of modern book storage underneath Bryant Park will preserve the Library's research collections.
