This is not an especially select bunch, since everyone needs money, and a $40 contribution from someone like me gets myself and a guest in to join the other several thousand people who show up to sip wine, eat cookies, listen to carols from a military glee club, get their face painted, or picture taken with people dressed as lions, Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, the Grinch, and others on stilts, who aren't there to change the light bulbs,
There really isn't anything about this open house that isn't open if you just pop-in on a given day and wander around yourself. Except for the stacks. There is an opportunity to tour the stacks of books that are beneath the main reading room, that go down seven levels, and extend west under Bryant Park.
The tour doesn't really last long, but it is informative. Our tour guide promised us we'd have the "longer" tour, but afterwards I figured this must have meant we walked more than the other group at the other end.
The first level of stacks, and the only one we went through, was down one flight of stairs from the main reading room. It was nice to go down a flight of stairs in NYC and then not need a MetroCard to keep going. We entered a very humid, low-ceilined place with fairly narrow aisles, with open metal-slated shelves that held nothing but books. Not a best seller in sight. These were books for reference, filed in the library's own system by size, that users can request from above that someone will hopefully retrieve and deliver before the lights go out.
Millions of titles are described as being there. The sort is so densely packed that OAP-OAW could be one shelf, or several. The third letter is the break. There is a narrow slot in the floor that runs along the base of the shelves that allows a view of the floor below, almost as if you were looking back down a staircase. This allows ventilation between the levels.
Pipes and wires in steel baskets run overheard. There isn't much height, and there is a submarine feel because of the narrowness of the aisles. If I had bumped into a periscope I wouldn't have been at all surprised. I would just hope the sub was one of ours.
The titles that I passed were obscure. Thick volumes with "Dutch Law" on the spine. I imagined someone trying to figure out how to void the sale of Manhattan from the Indians. Or, maybe New Jersey was also part of the deal, but no one ever bothered to cross the river and claim it to be New York. New Jersey's Governor Christie could be in for a real surprise. Other books passed were about "German Law" and Irish windows.
Miles of aisles, and I wasn't in Hope Depot. The stacks was described as going under Bryant Park to a western spot that could be entered or exited from a secret spot. No secret was divulged.
I imagined following an aisle of books and maybe popping up near the bust of Gertrude Stein, or perhaps all the way to the corner of 40th and Sixth and tickling the toe of the nine foot tall statue of Andrada, the hardly-known Brazilian who was considered a contributor to their independence and who loosely provides a tie-in that has never stuck, as Sixth Avenue is officially known as Avenue of the Americas. (Get it, North and South America? It is hard.)
But the Main Reading room is the real show, but you gotta look up. All the way up. Over 50 feet. It's one of the highest ceilings you'll ever see that doesn't have a scoreboard attached. The room itself is nearly a football field long, with the famous parquet, marquetry tables and brass shaded lamps that can intimately provide seating for 600 close, warm personal friends.
Say who you will about Donald Trump, and most will say plenty, he did once identify the library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the two best examples of surviving architecture in New York City.
I told my daughter who accompanied me that the Main Reading Room always reminded me of the passage Thomas Wolfe wrote about the old Pennsylvania Station that was torn down in 1964 for offices and Madison Square Garden.
There are still people who can tell you about the old Penn Station, but we are starting to get ready for co-pay gift cards from Mt. Sinai, or nursing homes, but we haven't completely disappeared. And to prove how things tie in my daughter told me that while she was waiting for me to get out of the freshly completed, unadorned men's room on the Amtrak level of the "new" Penn Station there was someone on their cell phone telling someone else that they were now at Penn Station, and it certainly wasn't Grand Central Terminal. Bring that guy back on the show.
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) wrote of the long departed upper level of Penn Station:
"The station...was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time.
"Men came and went, they passed and vanished, all were moving through the moments of their lives...but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof."
You won't catch a train out of the library, but you can certainly give your imagination a ride.
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