Photo: Ahmed Gaber for the New York Times.
The Hudson Park Library, one of more than 60 branches built in the city in the early 1900s with funding from the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. These branches typically included an apartment for a live-in custodian.
A couple years ago, a guy was discovered living secretly in a mall in Providence, and now there’s even a movie about him.
I’m thinking of that as I read this New York Times story about the hidden apartments in Carnegie libraries. (And here’s your regular reminder that robber barons like Carnegie were once philanthropists, too.)
John Freeman Gill writes, “New York City is full of secret spaces. … But few such places so capture the imagination as the apartments hidden inside the mansion-like public branch libraries funded more than a century ago by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Is there a voracious reader anywhere, after all, who doesn’t relish the idea of living in a library?
“In 1901, Carnegie committed $5.2 million (the equivalent of well over $170 million today) for the construction of dozens of neighborhood libraries on land provided by the city. Designed by powerhouse firms like McKim, Mead & White, more than 60 branches were built across the five boroughs, bringing not only books but architectural grandeur to working-class neighborhoods largely deprived of both. Hidden from the public above the elegantly appointed reading rooms, each library typically contained a modest family apartment for a custodian, who performed the punishing work of stoking its coal-fired furnace around the clock.
“In the latter half of the century, these custodial apartments were gradually vacated, as the coal furnaces were replaced and the caretakers retired, the last one around 2005. Over the years, many of the units were converted for new library uses, while the remaining dwellings, left to molder for decades, took on a decrepit, ghostly appearance. Today only seven Carnegie apartments survive intact in the New York Public Library system, all uninhabited.
“ ‘The first time I saw a Carnegie apartment, I was just blown away,’ said Iris Weinshall, chief operating officer of the New York Public Library, which operates 30 Carnegie branches in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island. ‘Many of them are almost like haunted houses. It’s a pretty eerie feeling.’
“Now, however, four of the abandoned apartments have been re-envisioned and renovated as part of a $176 million, city-funded modernization of five branches in under-resourced neighborhoods: the libraries at Fort Washington and 125th Street in Manhattan, Melrose and Hunts Point in the Bronx and Port Richmond on Staten Island.
“Overall, the Carnegie Branch Renovation Program preserved historic features like double-height ceilings and open-plan reading rooms, while upgrading the interiors to maximize public space and installing elevators in two libraries that lacked them. At the two Manhattan branches and Hunts Point, the custodial apartments were transformed into teen centers, while at Port Richmond, the unit became a mechanical room. The Melrose apartment, where a caretaker kept a chirping aviary of hundreds of birds in the 1950s, was lost to fire in 1959.
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who grew up in the city’s Carnegie libraries tend to be bookish sorts.
“ ‘I can hardly imagine what my life would’ve been like without the experience of living in that library,’ said Ronald Clark, 90, who moved into the third floor of the Georgian Revival-style Washington Heights branch as a teenager around 1949. ‘I was able to have all my questions answered as a young person growing up.’
“For example, he said, he was lying in bed one night at about age 15, ‘thinking about the things that the Bible says about the creation and the things that science, the archaeologists, have found. And I said, well, there seems to be a contradiction. So I got up and went downstairs, turned on one of the reading lights, and got out the Bible, laid it out, went to Reference, got an encyclopedia, and I read both of them and realized they were both saying exactly the same thing.’ That discovery, he added, ‘set me off on a search for all the scientific and spiritual connections that I could find.’
“Mr. Clark studied science at the City College of New York, becoming the first in his family to earn a degree. After performing classified work for the United States government in Nuremberg, Germany, he moved back to live with his custodian father, Raymond Clark, in the Washington Heights library. There he raised and home-schooled his daughter, Jamilah, for several years.
“In the evenings, Ms. Clark would accompany her grandfather downstairs to the children’s floor, where he had her sit on a table.
“ ‘He would be sweeping and mopping, and I would just sit up there and either read books, or they had a little television down there, so sometimes I would watch The Electric Company,’ she said. ‘Being that the library was closed, it was my own little paradise that I had all to myself.’ ”
More at the Times, here. Intriguing photos.
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