A Library’s Century

The Seward Park branch library was refurbished in 2004.



November 18, 2009, 11:56 am
A Library’s Century of ‘Hungering Imagination’
By SEWELL CHAN

The Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library opened 100 years ago this month, on Nov. 11, 1909, and the library will mark the centennial with a program of public events starting at 2 p.m. Thursday. Perhaps what is most remarkable about the branch, which was most recently renovated in 2004, is the continuity of the immigrant aspirations — then largely Jewish, now mostly Asian and Hispanic — it embodies.

“East Side Leads in Book Reading,” proclaimed the headline of a March 9, 1913, article in The New York Times Magazine. The article found that the Seward Park branch library, on East Broadway, reported a circulation of 425,571 — the highest of any branch — in the New York Public Library’s most recent report. The Times described the yearning in a rather dramatic fashion:

Centuries of famine and dearth of knowledge, and of cringing subservience to those who have had it, have taught the east side immigrant two important things about books: that what they contain can feed a starving mind and a hungering imagination with such royal richness as their lives could never afford them; and that their contents can lead him, step by step, along the journey to success and power and dominance. It is not far-fetched to say that many of the statesmen of the future are now in the making at Seward Park library.

The article proceeded to describe a typical day in the life of the library. The day started slow, with only a few patrons. “Now and again a lean and scholarly rabbi will pass up the white stone steps, bent upon inspecting the Talmudic treasures of the Jacob Schiff collection,” the article noted. “A few of the younger men and women trip in more briskly to pursue the necessary studies for civil service examinations.”

Immigrants pored over books in Russian, German, Yiddish and elementary English. But it was after 3 p.m., when school let out, that the library burst into life with the voices and cries of pupils.

The fortunate ones who come first file up the stairs and cluster around the circulating desks. Those who are returning books form in one line; those who are applying for cards in another. As fast as the librarians — and there are eight assistants required for this afternoon rush — can receive and record the returned books the youngsters surge to the “open shelves” and begin the search for their next selection.

And even when the children were sent home, at 6 p.m., the library remained in life, its downstairs reference room filling up into the early evening.

The article ended its account this way:

It is extraordinary, all things considered, how deeply the east side respects the trust the library imposes in it. It is no wonder they grasp after the benefactions of the library. Nothing could be more natural. But it deserves a special commendation that every east side reader brings his book back clean and intact, in spite of the fact, well known to the librarian, that many of them use their bathtubs and their ice chests as library shelves.