Seventy eight feet by two hundred and ninety seven under a painted sky, two halls of oak tables and bronze lamps either side of the delivery desk, two tiers of books with a gallery between them, and the afternoon coming in through the high west windows. You come in from Fifth Avenue, past the lions.
The library's Fifth Avenue building opened on May 23, 1911, designed by Carrère and Hastings in the Beaux-Arts style. The main reading room is 78 feet wide, 297 feet long and 52 feet high. It reopened on November 16, 1998 after a restoration, renamed for the children of a benefactor who gave 15 million dollars toward it. In May 2014 a rosette fell from the ceiling; a 12 million dollar restoration secured the rosettes with steel cables and the room reopened on October 5, 2016. The marble lions at the door were named Patience and Fortitude by Mayor La Guardia in the 1930s.
Source · Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Wikipedia ↗
The reading room built to its own plan with the delivery desk in the middle, the long oak tables with their bronze lamps and readers at them, two tiers of bookcases and the gallery, the tall windows, the coffered gilt ceiling with painted skies, the chandeliers, and outside the marble front on Fifth Avenue with Patience and Fortitude on the steps. Mood: quiet afternoon. 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.