Central Library Audio Tour: Grand Lobby

Episode Transcript

You are listening to the Brooklyn Public Library audio tour of the Central Library. I am Norman Erickson and I have been a librarian here at the Central building for over 30 years. I have led tours of the buildings for patrons and staff for many, many years. Now, we are bringing you a bit of that tour in a self-guided audio format. This section of the tour includes the Lobby of the Central Library. Feel free to walk around as you listen.

This is a space here, itf you look up, is a three-story space. We have a number of things in this area that I'll point out. Let's turn over here towards the showcases. The showcases that you're looking at feature many events, artifacts and programing information, as well as local artwork. They have been here since the original building. Now, the two little areas that are on each side of the door now house our circulation services. Originally, in 1941, these were coat check rooms. These areas now are called are the Major Owns Welcome Center, where all of our circulation functions happen. Now, Major Owens ... Major worked for Brooklyn Public Library in 1962. Then Major was elected to Congress, and he served in Congress as our representative for many, many years. Major's favorite line was: he's the librarian in Congress, as opposed to the Librarian of Congress.

When you turn around and you look back at the front doors, you'll look up and you'll see the back of the grill work, which is not that attractive, but you will see a giant eagle. He is hollow, but he still weighs a lot, and he's coated in zinc. For many years, he stood in Downtown Brooklyn on top of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle building. When the Eagle building was torn down in the 1950s as many of the renovations that created Cadman Plaza, the eagle took a new home. He was part of Brooklyn Historical Society. Then he was down behind the Brooklyn Museum. Then he came to our building. So, the eagle has now found a permanent home.

If you go through the big archway, you'll walk into what we call the Circulation Hall or the Grand Hall or the Grand Lobby. It's been referred to as many different things over the years. In 1941, the official name was Circulation Hall. At one time, if you looked it down on the floor, which has now been replaced, there used to be two brass disks. These were where the original information desk was set. It was a desk with a chair for the librarian and a chair for a patron, a telephone and a lamp. This was the first point of service that any person would have had with a librarian. They would then direct you to the various points in this building.

If you turned around back and looked towards the Information Commons ... now the Shelby White Leon Levy Information Commons is a grand space, seven meeting rooms and a recording studio, as well as iMacs and regular computers in that room. The columns inside the room show you the original location, from 1941 until the 1950s. There was a set of windows that overlooked a little garden. That was what we called the fiction alcove.

If you're standing there facing the Information Commons and you look over to your right, there's a large door near the café. Above it, you'll see a glass panel in the wall. That panel used to light up. Where the café is now used to be what we call the call desk. You would fill out a call slip, you would go over to the desk, hand it to the clerk who would check a set of catalog cards back there to see if a book was listed as being in storage. If it was, they would deliver that slip to the basement. The high-tech method of getting that call slip from the Lobby to the basement was a string with a plastic tube on it and a hole in the floor. They would assign you a number and they would say when the number is lit, come back. That panel was disconnected when we renovated the building in 2020.

The café is currently run by an organization called Emma's Torch. Emma's Torch is an organization that provides culinary training for refugees so they can find a meaningful career in the food service industry. The students, the people that are working there at Emma's Torch, do receive various professional trainings provided by BPL staff.

Also located in the Lobby, up until 1996, were the card catalogs. They filled the rear half of the spaces in front of the ledges where you see there are catalog computers. Those were removed in 1996. By that time, we had an operational online public access catalog.

Some fun facts about the nonpublic areas that are below us. There's four floors that go straight down to the basement. They're numbered backwards. The basement that's right below the first floor is called deck four. Deck three, deck two, deck one. Deck one is the lowest lobby. The deck one area, actually was discussion in the 1941 plans to make it a subway station. The space was also at one point designated as our bomb shelter. There used to be a plaque that said "Civil Defense Shelter" on the outside of the building on Eastern Parkway. This is where we would go had the sirens come on. I found in those areas evidence of the bomb shelter, remains of the Civil Defense biscuit tins and the water tins. There's also the parts, the remains of a generator down there. My joke is that we would have a lot of things to read as we slowly died of radiation poisoning.

Also located on the Eastern Parkway side of the building, down in the lower levels is what we call the morgue. No, it's not for bodies. The morgue is a newspaper term, which is where the newspapers would store their clipping files, their photo files, and everything like that. And that's what this area holds. We have the clipping file and the photo files of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which went out of business in 1955. We don't touch these anymore because the Brooklyn Daily Eagle is now fully digitized and available as part of the website through the Brooklyn Newsstand. There is in there a globe that for many years was upstairs in the children's room. And we have some photographs in our archives of individuals standing there around the globe. The funny thing is, all the years of wear, the kids rubbing their fingers on it, the New York City and the environs are missing, as is Los Angeles.

We're going to leave the circulation hall and go through the archway into a division that's called Languages, Literature and Fiction.

This is the end of the second stop on BPL's Central Audio Tour. The next stop is the Flatbush side of the building. This is the end of the second stop on BPL's Central Audio Tour. The next stop on our tour is the Flatbush side of the building. Walk towards Languages & Literature and you'll find a small blue plaque with a QR code that you can scan when you're ready to listen to the next installment. Or, you can navigate to our web page to find the next stop.

This tour was narrated by Norman Eriksen, and conceived by Norman Eriksen and LaCresha Neal. It was produced by Virginia Marshall, LaCresha Neal, Jennifer Proffitt, and Laurie Elvove, with help from Natiba Guy-Clement, Brynna Ververs, Caroline Hartman, and Mary Dickson.