The Central Library of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza, the limestone building shaped like an open book, seen from the forecourt with its tall bronze entrance screen and its fifteen gilded panels shining in the middle of the curve. People sit on the steps, pigeons work the forecourt, traffic runs round the plaza behind you toward the Arch and the Bailey Fountain. The New Yorkers hang on the granite base of the curved front along the terrace, and inside, on the blond oak of the lobby.
Raymond F. Almirall designed a Beaux-Arts library for the site in 1911; only the Flatbush Avenue wing was built before the design was scrapped, and Alfred Morton Githens and Francis Keally redesigned it in Art Deco in 1935. The building, shaped like an open book seen from the air, opened on February 1, 1941. Its 40 foot bronze entrance screen has fifteen gilded panels of literary characters by Thomas Hudson Jones and C. Paul Jennewein, framed by 50 foot columns with gilded bas-reliefs by Jennewein, set in a concave facade that follows the oval of Grand Army Plaza and faces the Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch. About 350,000 square feet on four storeys, over 1.7 million items. City landmark June 17, 1997; National Register January 11, 2002.
Source · Central Library (Brooklyn Public Library), Wikipedia ↗
The concave Indiana limestone front following the oval of the plaza, the gray granite base, the two tall pylons with their gilded reliefs, the bronze screen with fifteen gilded panels over the doors, BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY cut above the entrance, the terrace with its three stairways, lamps and planting beds, the long wings with tall slot windows running down Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway, the lobby in terrazzo and blond oak, and across the plaza the Bailey Fountain and the Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch. Mood: afternoon on the library steps. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.