Spring Cleaning in Perspective

Photo of historian Robert O'Connell from Wired New York

Cleaning my house is an activity I rank right up there with visiting the dentist, well maybe not that bad, but I do avoid it like the plague.  When the dog hair tumbleweeds begin to blow across the living room, I haul out the vacuum and do the minimum possible to keep the place respectable.

Tackling the job of my house seems a heck of a lot easier after reading about the NYPL’s massive renovation of the 150,000 square foot library facade in 2007.  The $50 million, three year project was given to the firm Wiss, Janey, Elstner Associates, Inc. who had previously cleaned up The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s limestone building and the granite walls of the American Museum of Natural History.
The NYPL is made of Vermont marble and was downright dingy thanks to 100 years of car exhaust and NYC weather.  Streaks of soot blackened the marble and once sharp architectural details and statues were beginning to erode.  There were 3,000 cracks to be fixed not to mention the stairs, plazas and the roof to consider - this sounds an awful lot like my house, except for the plazas.  
After the announcement of the renovation, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg got so excited that he called the Mayor of Paris to ask if the city’s lighting engineer, Francois Jousse, could offer his services, he also contributed $20 million toward the project on behalf of the city.  I didn’t even know cities had lighting engineers.  Paul LeClerc, the library director said, “My ambition is for this to be the building you simply must see in New York at nighttime because it is so beautiful and it is so important".

So what exactly were they doing for the three long years of renovation?  To start with they replaced 2,000 chipped marble stones, installed 18,000 feet of bird netting (poop is not a good look), refinished 345 bronze windows, repaired 1,100 cracks and re-pointed 100,000 feet of masonry joints.  Then they washed the whole shebang with 200 gallons of Vulpex concentrated soap. When you click through the slide show you have to agree that the results are astonishing - or as New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn put it "the joint was in way worse shape than I ever knew."

Bloomberg and LeClerc’s dreams of library glory came true in February, just in time for this year’s centennial celebration.  LeClerc declared that the library, “gleams like an alabaster palace” (he wasn’t even exaggerating) and announced that it was on its way to being the most perfect beaux-arts building in America.   When I saw this Wall Street Journal photograph I did find it hard to imagine a more beautiful temple for great thoughts than the New York Public Library.