Central Library Audio Tour: Plaza

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 will include the area outside the Central Library, from the flagpole in Eastern Parkway to the Plaza and the front steps. Feel free to walk around as you listen.

As we stand out here in front of the Plaza, I'm going to give you some basic background about the building itself. We call it the Central Library, but it's also known as the Ingersoll Memorial Library. It was named after Mr. Raymond Ingersoll, who was our borough president from 1934 to 1940. The building itself first opened to the public in 1941 on February 1st, only the first floor. The second floor was opened to the public in 1955. The third floor was opened to the public sometime in the 1970s. Its architectural style can be referred to as Art Moderne. The architects are Mr. Alfred Morton Githens and Mr. Francis Keally. Inside the building in the lobby are Appalachian white oak paneling. And the exterior is clad in Indiana limestone. 

As you stand on the front steps, turn and look at the building. There's two buildings here. There's the building we have now, and the building that never was. The building that never was was part of a plan to create in the city of Brooklyn, a cultural center. It would have been a high Beaux-Arts style that would have matched the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences Building, which is next door. You know it all as the Brooklyn Museum. There would have been four floors with a massive dome. The construction started in 1912, then ceased due to lack of funding. Then it resumes in 1935 with a brand new design, the building you're looking at today.

The only surviving section of the 1911 exterior wall can be seen from the parking lot on the Flatbush Avenue side of the building.  While it sat unfinished for many years, the pigeons decided to take and make a nice home in it. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called it the "most expensive pigeon roost in the world" in 1938.

Now, as you stand here, we're facing the front of the building. I would like you to turn and look towards Eastern Parkway. You see the flagpole. You walk past it every day. That flagpole is a ship's mast. And it was taken from a yacht called the Shamrock III that was owned by a man named Sir Thomas Lipton. When the yacht was decommissioned, the flagpole was moved to this location on May 30th, 1959, and dedicated with a big ceremony. When you're looking at the façade of the building, you'll notice a number of different things. Now the grill work over the door, it's gilded bronze, and it's showing you figures from American literature that was popular in the 1930s. There are many different figures up there. There's Walt Whitman, there's Brer Rabbit. And my favorite, which is the one up at the very center, a cockroach and a cat named Archy and Mehitabel. They're from a series of short stories called Archy and Mehitabel, written by a man named Don Marquis, who was a newspaper reporter for The New York Sun.

On both sides of the door are sculptural columns showing the evolution of art and science. The artists for these columns and the grill work are men named Carl Jennewein and Thomas Hudson Jones. The text that you see right above the doors was written by a man named Roscoe C.E. Brown, who was the Brooklyn Public Library's board president from 1940 to 1942. The plaza itself, I call it our library's living room. We host many different events. Right now, it's a very comfortable space. I come here every morning and I see people sitting out there using our WiFi. Had the 1911 building been built, this would have been a grand, monumental staircase that would have entered on the second floor. The plot in your current configuration was created in 2006 when we built the Dweck, which is located directly underneath the Plaza.

Now, let's go inside the building. Come on in through the doors, and we're going to enter into the outer Lobby.

This is the end of the first stop on BPL's Central Audio Tour. The next stop is the Grand Lobby. Inside, 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.