New York Public Library
A marble palace of books on the site of a city reservoir, and two lions named Patience and Fortitude
The story
Before you is the main building of the New York Public Library. This site, between 40th and 42nd Streets, was once the Croton Reservoir, the city’s water supply and a favorite place for a stroll. Some five hundred workers spent two years taking its walls apart. The architects John Carrère and Thomas Hastings won the design competition. The cornerstone was laid on the tenth of November 1902. On the twenty-third of May 1911, President William Howard Taft presided over the dedication, and the next morning readers were let in. Look at the lions by the steps. The sculptor Edward Clark Potter modeled them, and the Piccirilli Brothers carved them from pink Tennessee marble. At first the lions were called Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after the library’s founders. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia gave them new names: Patience and Fortitude. Those, he said, were the qualities New Yorkers would need to get through hard times. Patience sits to the south, on the left of the entrance, and Fortitude to the north, on the right. Go up to the third floor, to the Rose Main Reading Room. It is 297 feet long, and its ceiling with painted skies is 52 feet high. People still read and work here.
Visiting
Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street (476 Fifth Avenue). Free admission. Hours and tours are on nypl.org. Bryant Park is right behind the building.
Photos
Sources
- The New York Public Library — The Library Lions: Patience & Fortitude
- The New York Public Library — History of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
- The New York Public Library — Rose Main Reading Room
- NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission — press release, August 8, 2017
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