Jefferson Market Library

A Victorian courthouse that looks like a castle, saved from demolition by its neighbors and turned into a library

Local name: Jefferson Market Library

Collection: Greenwich Village and the East Village · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The former courthouse and its clock tower on Sixth Avenue · Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Jefferson Market Library. It looks like a castle, but it was built as a courthouse. In 1832 a city market opened here and was named after President Thomas Jefferson. The stalls crowded around a wooden fire lookout tower, and the police court was squeezed in above a saloon. In the early 1870s the city set out to put up a new building here. The project became a feeding trough for politicians of the Tweed machine: one hundred fifty thousand dollars were spent, and by the fall of 1873 the site held nothing but a pile of rotting materials. Then the architect Frederick Clarke Withers took over. It was built from 1874 to 1877. The police court was downstairs and the civil court upstairs. Next to it stood a five-story jail and the market. The corner tower held a fire bell, and the watchman’s room was 98 feet up, above every roof around. Over the entrance, instead of the usual church scene of the Last Judgment, there is a carving from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” In 1885 American architects voted it the fifth most beautiful building in the country. In 1945 the court closed, and the building could have been torn down. Neighbors led by Margot Gayle first got the tower clock running again. Then they persuaded the New York Public Library to take over the building. The architect Giorgio Cavaglieri reworked the rooms, and on the twenty-seventh of November 1967 the library opened. The old police court is now the children’s reading room. The old jail is long gone. A women’s prison was later built in its place, that was torn down too, and now there is a garden there.

Visiting

425 Avenue of the Americas, at the corner of West Tenth Street. It is a working library, and entry is free; see nypl.org for hours. Subway: the A, B, C, D, E, F or M to West 4th Street–Washington Square, or the 1 train to Christopher Street–Sheridan Square.