The New York Public Library’s venerable lion-guarded building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street is to be renamed for the Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, who has agreed to jump-start a $1 billion expansion of the library system with a guaranteed $100 million of his own.
The project, to be announced on Tuesday, aims to transform the Central Library into a destination for book borrowing as well as research. The Mid-Manhattan branch, on the east side of Fifth Avenue at 40th Street, will be sold and its circulating collection absorbed into the new space.
The gift from Mr. Schwarzman, a library trustee and buyout guru who made fortunes as the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, is among the largest to any cultural institution in the city’s history. The 1911 Beaux Arts structure on Fifth Avenue will be called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building after construction is completed around 2014. The building is protected by landmark status, and the library expects the name to be etched on the building should approval be granted by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.
"We hope to incise the name of the building in stone in a subtle, discreet way on either side of the main entrance about three feet off the ground," said Paul LeClerc, president of the library’s board of trustees. "It’s in keeping with the dignity of the building."
Continue reading the main storyIn an e-mail message on Monday. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, “With this donation, Steve is giving back to the city that gave him so much and is helping ensure that New York remains a cultural and intellectual capital of the world.”
The project reflects a new resolve among library officials to adjust to a shifting information world and become more responsive to city residents. “We’re more focused on what people want from us,” Mr. LeClerc said in an interview. “It’s a mindset change.”
In an interview, Mr. Schwarzman, 61, said he was impressed by the project when it was presented to the board last June.
“This was an absolutely first-class, professional, practical strategic plan, and it deserved to be supported,” he said. “The library helps lower- and middle-income people — immigrants — get their shot at the American dream.”
Mr. Schwarzman said it was the library that proposed renaming the landmark building. “They said, ‘We’d like you to be the lead gift and give us $100 million and we’d like to rename the main branch after you,’ ” he said. “I said, ‘That sounds pretty good.’ ”
He said his gift would be dispensed over the next few years (he declined to be more specific) and that he had signed a contract governing the donation. “It binds me and my estate, even if I die,” Mr. Schwarzman said.
The library is hardly the first cultural building to bear a donor’s name. The new six-story building at the Museum of Modern Art was named after David and Peggy Rockefeller, for example, and the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center is named for Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman.
Mr. LeClerc said there was no dissension within the library’s board of trustees over the renaming. Still, the change will doubtless invite spirited commentary. Mr. Schwarzman has become something of a lightning rod for critics of Wall Street excess, especially the high-spending ways of private-equity chiefs.
Many of those financiers have suffered a comeuppance since the credit markets foundered last year. Mr. Schwarzman’s stake in Blackstone has plummeted from about $7.8 billion to about $4 billion since he took his company public last June, and Blackstone’s shares have tumbled about 32 percent in the last two months alone.
Mr. Schwarzman said his recent losses would have no effect on his gift. “As you have more resources in life, it’s your obligation to deploy those for the benefit of others,” he said.
The library itself has drawn criticism for some other transactions, like selling the Donnell branch in Midtown Manhattan in November to Orient-Express Hotels Ltd. for $59 million. The branch will be razed to make way for an 11-story hotel, with the library taking over the first floor and an underground level.
In April 2005, the library decided to sell 19 works from its art collection to bolster its endowment and raise money to buy books. The sales netted $53 million, but critics lamented the loss of canonical pieces including “Kindred Spirits,” a Hudson River School painting by Asher B. Durand.
Mr. Schwarzman is also the board chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and a trustee of the Frick Collection, the New York City Ballet, the Asia Society and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
The costs of the $1 billion library project are to be covered through the sale of some existing buildings and a $500 million capital campaign that has already brought in $250 million, including the Schwarzman gift.
The library is also seeking government support. New York City, which owns the Fifth Avenue building, provides about half of the library’s $265 million operating budget. It is also contributing $30 million toward a $50 million renovation of the building’s facades that is already under way.
The new circulating library will be situated in a vast space that currently houses eight levels of stacks below the Main Reading Room and overlooks Bryant Park through strip windows. The stacks will be moved to an existing three-acre storage area beneath the park, opening the way for the space to be gutted and reconfigured with new rooms for children and teenagers and ample computer work stations. Library officials said they had not yet chosen an architect.
The plan also calls for a new cafe and information center to enliven Astor Hall just inside the Fifth Avenue entrance, wireless Internet access throughout the building, refurbishment of branch libraries and the creation of two new libraries in Upper Manhattan and Staten Island.
“We’re not going to set up huge neon signs in Astor Hall,” said Joshua L. Steiner, the library board’s vice chairman. “At the same time, people need to feel welcome.”
Mr. LeClerc said he wanted the new main branch to serve the needs of teenagers working on term papers, graduate students writing theses, rare book aficionados searching out volumes and children flocking to story hour. “You can grow up intellectually, academically and professionally in the building,” he said.
By making the Fifth Avenue building more accessible and drawing patrons from the shuttered Mid-Manhattan branch, the Central Library hopes to attract as many as four million people per year, up from the current one million.
Founded as a public institution in 1895, the library has four special research libraries and more than 85 branches. The main library had a small circulating division from 1911 to 1970, when the Mid-Manhattan branch across the street opened.
Officials said the system was shifting to what they call a “hub and spoke” concept. The idea is to create hub libraries with comprehensive services — literacy training, homework help, job search assistance — and to tailor programs at satellite branches to meet the needs of specific neighborhoods. Those hubs would aim to replicate the success of the new Bronx Library Center, which has become a thriving gathering spot since it opened in that borough’s Fordham section in 2006. It has become a magnet for young people in the neighborhood, most of whom are African-American, Caribbean or Latino. (Brooklyn and Queens have their own library systems.)
“The Bronx library was designed to send signals, both overt and subtle, to the community that use it that this is their space,” Mr. LeClerc said. “It was designed with them in mind.”
Based on extensive research, the library system learned that 60 percent of its users are members of minority groups and 60 percent are from families with annual incomes of less than $50,000.
Officials hope that the Central Library at 42nd Street, with its two stone lions named Patience and Fortitude, will become a draw for such residents. “The average user of one of our branch libraries wasn’t coming to 42nd Street,” Mr. Steiner added. “This new plan is the further democratization of that building.”
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