A Library Where the Hush Is Over Its Very Existence

by: Stephen Farrell

Nothing on the street outside says that it is there. First-time visitors must push through a revolving door of a court building in Lower Manhattan on faith, and hear their footsteps echo across a vast marble lobby before they finally glimpse a set of wooden double doors near a staircase leading down to a goblin-dark basement.

This is the entrance to the City Hall Library, open to all yet known to relatively few and visible to just about no one. “I didn’t even know this was here. Is it open to the public?” Ydanis Rodriguez, a City Council member from Manhattan, asked as he recently entered it for the first time, even though it is a short walk from his offices.

Relative obscurity is nothing new for this institution, which is actually housed inside the Surrogate’s Court building. It is over 100 years old, but in July 1898, The New York Times wrote of its predecessor, a hodgepodge of a library inside City Hall, “There are not many who know of its existence, and few who have heard of it know of its location.” An apt description for the current library, too.

Christine Bruzzese, the supervising librarian, said the library had 66,000 books on the shelves and in storage, and 285,000 periodicals, journals and volumes of clippings. The most popular request from the public is to research old land and property decisions by the city’s Board of Estimate, which ceased to exist in 1990.

But while book titles can be searched online, the books themselves cannot be downloaded or taken out. They must be read on site, in one of two large rooms: one is somewhat dark and filled with bookshelves and old newspaper clippings; the other has a few computers and the librarians.

The volumes stocked by the library are not the kinds of books most people would consider summer reading — “Financial Problems of the City of New York” is one title — and they also tend to be large and bulky.

“Sometimes they will say, ‘It’s a lot of reading.’ I always say, ‘Well, you know what, I wish I had time to sit and read it. I would love to do it,’” Ms. Bruzzese said. “I think a lot of people, too, are used to electronic things now, they expect to find something on a computer. They see a book this size, and they think, ‘Oh, it’s a lot to read.’”

Below the library are the cavernous storerooms and vaults that contain some of the maps, books, photographs and other items that are part of the Municipal Archives. They document the city’s government and leadership dating back to the unification of the boroughs into New York City in 1898, and back to the first mayor of the city, Thomas Willett, in 1665.

The history of the city is celebrated in old sepia photographs, wall-size topographical maps and reproduction manuscripts on display within the library and in a visitor center next to the library.
Yet there is not a hint of any of this on the granite exterior of the imposing Beaux-Arts building at 31 Chambers Street, behind City Hall. The sign says only “Surrogate’s Court,” with just a small brass plaque explaining that it once was the Hall of Records. That was the building’s original purpose when it was completed — at a cost of $7 million — in 1907.

The librarians who work for the City Hall Library, like the workers for the Municipal Archives, are employees of the city’s Department of Records and Information Services. The librarians say the courthouse’s status as a designated landmark means that they are not allowed to hang a sign on the building’s exterior.

Since April 2012, the city has made available online nearly 900,000 digitized images and other material from the archives and plans to add 1.5 million more items. A new era looms in December, with the end of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s tenure. He will be the first mayor to provide his official documents in digital form.

The process of digitization — there are 840,000 annual visits to the Records Department Web sites — means that the obscurity of the site’s physical location is becoming less of an issue. Still, the library does attract visitors to its quarters.

Nicole Richer, 20, a British student, traveled from England to research organized crime during the Prohibition era. She found the library easy to find, despite the lacks of signs. “I used Google Maps,” she said.

from: NY Times