If Walls Could Talk

NYSL in 1840, photo from NYSL website

If the New York Society Library walls could talk we’d be in for some juicy stories (see Reform and Fever posts).  Thanks to Henry Cooper and Jenny Lawerence’s book,  The New York Society Library:  250 Years, I can share a few with you.  By 1840 New York City’s population and economy had exploded.  The city had outgrown it’s modest borders and spread it’s tentacles across the island of Manhattan.  Most library patrons, prominent business men, had followed the flow and moved uptown.  The Society Library on Nassau Street needed a makeover and a facelift.  

It arrived in two forms.  First, the  New York Athenaeum (a competing private library)  entered into a real estate/merger deal with the Society Library and soon discovered it was unable to make ends meet.  The Athenaeum was forced to dissolve and its members, collections and space were absorbed by the Society.  Secondly, the library moved to a new location, far more convenient for it’s patrons and the new members from the Athenaeum, I guess what they say about location is true.

Leonard Street and Broadway was the address of the new library, and it certainly attracted some attention from the writers, readers and thinkers of the time.  In 1840 The New Yorker described the newly constructed library this way:

"The New York Society Library has lately been re-opened in its new and beautiful edifice...a new ornament of our principal avenue.  A spacious hall occupies the middle of the building. The visitor enters this and ascends a broad flight of stairs, which leads to the reading room in the rear. This is a lofty and well proportioned apartment, with windows at each end, and in it are four commodious tables covered with rich food for the literary appetite.  This room, brilliantly lighted at night, with its soft carpets deadening the sound of footsteps, its cushioned arm chairs, and its rich supplies of periodicals, renewed by every steamship, forms the perfection of literary luxury.”

The interior may have been luxurious, but the real treat came from who you might bump into:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a series of six talks in 1842.  He later wrote in his diary that the audience was somewhat puzzled by his ideas and that he made about $200.
• Walt Whitman attended Emerson’s talks and the two men met. When Whitman published  Leaves of Grass, several years later, Emerson declared him “the great American poet.”
• Henry David Thoreau wrote that the librarian permitted him  to “take out some untake-out-able books, which I was threatening to read on the spot.”
• Edgar Allen Poe followed a few years later with a series of lectures on poetry in America.  The New York Herald reported that his opinions were, “venal, ignorant, and entirely unfit to form a judgment on the most humblest [sic] productions of the writers of this country—of course, his own included."
• Tourists were also spotted in among the shelves and included “Prince Bonaparte (the young Napoleon III, in temporary exile in America), Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, James Fenimore Cooper (who afterward became a member), Francis Parkman, W. Ellery Channing, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John James Audobon.”
• Herman Melville used the library to write and research Moby Dick.  Records show that he checked out Bougainville's Voyage Around the World in January 1848, Scoresby's Arctic Regions and North Whale Fishery in April 1850.  Moby Dick was published in 1851.

Just imagine being a mosquito on those walls...watching Dickens browse the shelves, Thoreau beg the librarian for a book, Emerson expounding or Melville scratching out his story about a whale.

Forget the books,  just let me rub some elbows.