![]() Less ignorable, however, was Schwarzman’s name carved onto the front of the building in enormous letters, a horrifying ‘disfigurement’, many thought, on the hitherto unblemished face of its 1911 Carrère and Hastings facade. (Few cab drivers would know where to go if their passenger asked to be dropped at the Schwarzman Building.) Soon after, the library’s main building was officially renamed the Stephen A Schwarzman Building, a fact that its visitors and readers continue to cheerfully ignore. That story begins in 2008, when Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire CEO of the global investment firm Blackstone, gave the library $100m. These are fraught questions and cultural institutions around the globe are looking to the unfolding story of the NYPL for answers. What should a library be in our digital age and, more pragmatically, what can it be? Who decides what ‘relevance’ means and by what metrics? How can organisations create an alliance for change and persuade a sometimes sceptical public that reinvention is actually required? In short, how can a venerable, privately funded public institution renew and sustain itself, remaining financially viable without compromising its integrity? When the ongoing saga of what the NYPL calls its renovation and what others call its desecration reached a crisis point earlier this year, it became clear that the case of the NYPL isn’t just a New York story, but an internationally high-profile set of questions about our cultural institutions and their futures. Now, though, an ongoing and controversial set of plans for its drastic renovation have demonstrated that even this most sacrosanct and seemingly inviolable of cultural institutions is vulnerable. ![]() The library always seemed like an institution impervious to change. But unlike the Library of Congress, the NYPL is open to everyone for free. Its collection of 8.2m books makes it second in size only to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. As these two camps attest, it is both a monument and a resource: a tourist attraction, but also one of the world’s finest research libraries. On a hot Monday afternoon in early June, those thronging its steps fall into two groups: tourists, who take artful selfies of themselves in front of the building’s columns or beside its famous stone lions and scholars, biographers, students, academics, writers, amateur researchers and the longstanding resident oddballs that venerable institutions like this invariably attract. It’s been in the headlines recently as it hosted the artist Kara Walker’s huge sugar sphinx sculpture but in March this year the City Planning Commission signed off on plans for a $1.5bn redevelopment of the property, including a high-rise apartment building.Īnd then there’s the New York Public Library's main building in Bryant Park (often referred to as the NYPL): all 20,000 white marble blocks of it a National Historic Landmark since 1965. Then there’s the case of the Domino Sugar Factory: an enormous, landmark building on the Brooklyn waterfront dating from 1882. A sports and office complex was built in its stead and the station moved below ground. It was demolished in 1963 when, under financial pressure, the Pennsylvania Railroad sold the air rights to the property. ![]() Consider the 1910 Beaux-Arts masterpiece Penn Station, inspired by the Gare d’Orsay in Paris. You can buy %New York Public Library Lion Bookends Shops & Purchase Online.New York, a city which seems to reinvent its own urban landscape every week, can be ruthlessly unsentimental when it comes to its heritage. ![]() yes, we have”%New York Public Library Lion Bookends” here. for %New York Public Library Lion Bookends.
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