The Building
Marble on the library building is about three feet thick, and the building is Vermont marble and brick all the way through. The exterior is 20,000 blocks of stone, each one numbered in preparation for a renovation announced in 2007. It stretches 390 feet along Fifth Avenue.
Two stone lions (made of Tennessee marble) lie at either side of the stairway to the entrance. The famous pair guarding the entrance were sculpted by Edward Clark Potter. Their original names, "Leo Astor" and "Leo Lenox" (in honor of the library's founders) were transformed into Lord Astor and Lady Lenox (although both lions are male), and in the 1930s they were nicknamed "Patience" and "Fortitude" by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who chose the names because he felt that the citizens of New York would need to possess these qualities to see themselves through the Great Depression. Patience is on the south side (the left as one faces the main entrance) and Fortitude on the north.
Before the end pavilions are flagpoles, whose sculpted bronze bases designed by Thomas Hastings in 1912 were realized by the sculptor Raffaele Menconi, who often worked closely with New York architects of the Beaux-Arts generation and had a deft command of the 16th century Italian Mannerist classical idiom that was required by Hasting's design. The bronzes were cast at Tiffany Studios in Long Island City. They were rededicated to New York's former Reform mayor, John Purroy Mitchell.
Read more about this topic: New York Public Library Main Branch
Famous quotes containing the word building:
“People do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it: a mouse in a pitch barrel.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The real dividing line between early childhood and middle childhood is not between the fifth year and the sixth year—it is more nearly when children are about seven or eight, moving on toward nine. Building the barrier at six has no psychological basis. It has come about only from the historic-economic-political fact that the age of six is when we provide schools for all.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)