Two marble lions, a reading room the length of a city block, and no ticket. One of the few genuinely free great interiors in Midtown.
Patience and Fortitude
The two lions on the steps were carved in 1911 and were originally called Leo Astor and Leo Lenox after the library’s founding benefactors. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia renamed them during the Depression for the qualities he thought New Yorkers needed to get through it. Patience is on the south side, Fortitude on the north, and New Yorkers can tell you which is which without hesitating.
The building sits on what was the Croton Distributing Reservoir, a walled artificial lake that held the city’s drinking water until 1900. When they drained it, they found the site was perfect for a library and demolished the reservoir walls to build on the foundations.
The Rose Main Reading Room
Third floor, and it is the reason to come. It is 297 feet long, two city blocks of oak tables under a painted ceiling of clouds fifty-two feet up, lit by chandeliers and enormous arched windows. It holds about six hundred readers and on a weekday afternoon most of the seats are taken by people genuinely working, which is the point — this is a functioning public library, not a museum of one.
You can sit down. Anyone can. There is no card, no fee and no requirement to be doing anything in particular. Take a seat at a table, be quiet, and stay as long as you like. Very few visitors realise this is allowed and most take a photograph from the doorway and leave.
The ceiling closed for two years after a decorative rosette fell out of it in 2014. The restoration anchored every one of them.
What else is inside
Astor Hall, the white marble entrance, is worth a minute on its own.
The Gottesman Exhibition Hall on the ground floor runs free rotating exhibitions from the collections, and the collections are extraordinary — the library holds a Gutenberg Bible, Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Dickens’s letter opener with his cat’s paw mounted on the handle, and the original stuffed toys that became Winnie the Pooh. Not all of it is on display at once. The Pooh bears usually are, in the children’s centre, and they are smaller and more careworn than anyone expects.
The Map Division and the Berg Collection of English and American literature are open to researchers and, with a free library card, to anyone who asks properly.
Practical
It is free, it is open six days a week, and it closes on Sundays outside of limited afternoon hours — check before making a Sunday plan around it. Bags are screened at the door. Photography without flash is fine in most rooms and signposted where it is not.
Bryant Park is directly behind the building and shares its block. The library’s stacks run underneath the park lawn, seven storeys of books below the grass.
More Landmarks
Statue of Liberty
A French gift that arrived in 214 crates and spent a year in pieces on an island nobody wanted. The ferry is the ticket — everything else is an upgrade.
Brooklyn Bridge
Fourteen years, three Roeblings and twenty-odd deaths to build. Free to walk, best at seven in the morning, and the direction you cross matters more than the time.
Times Square
Loud, bright, and genuinely worth twenty minutes once. Go after dark, keep your hands on your bag, and do not eat here.