two-block area which used to hold a water reservoir for the southern part of Manhattan. It's a Beaux Arts building like the best of them; it has huge faux-Renaissance ceilings, some painted with pink clouds and others with mythological scenes; there's so much marble it might give the Taj Mahal a run for its money. The main reading room is up a giant-sized staircase to a "third floor" which is really a ninth floor. (The picture below, which I found online, confirms this.) It's all very, very grand.Could it be too grand? Compared to the SLV, which feels like a natural extension of the street life of Swanston and Lonsdale, the NYPL feels like a fortress, indeed like a great ship - an ark! - far removed from the street below. Great treasures are here made available to anyone (good on ya!), but it's clearly a treasure chest. A mighty temple to learning, to the supreme importance of books and knowledge, their care and their distribution: what's not to like? And yet it felt strangely disproportionate, even more so than the national libraries it evokes.
A great hall like this is perfect for an opera house, or a museum. But books seems so quintessentially private, intimate... Why the monumental mass?I know, I know; as a teenager I too I sought refuge in a library (the magic mushroom at UCSD) which seemed to offer an escape from a cruel and barbarous world. And I've spent many hours in the vast acreage of the new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (arrayed around its weird captive forest), enchanted by the sense of being a worker bee in the great hive of knowledge. (Unlike the NYPL and SLV, only scholars are allowed in there.) And besides, once you get the book you're looking for, even if it's not rare and hasn't been used by famous people in the past, the rest of the world vanishes... doesn't really matter where you are. All that is true. But for a sense that these books are now, as they always have been, also part of the world... I commend the SLV!
