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For Libraries, a Time of Rebirth

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: September 28, 1997

DON'T bother to shush. This ample room, luminous in morning light that streams through a glass curtain wall, will soon be the multicultural center of the Queens Borough Public Library's Flushing branch. But for now, it is a construction site. And no librarian is going to stop the whine of a 14-inch saw buzzing through metal studs.

Nor is the din confined to Main Street, Queens. Across New York City, more than $300 million is being spent on the construction and renovation of public and private libraries.

''It's a phenomenal moment of rebirth,'' said Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, which embraces Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island. ''I imagine this is what it felt like when Andrew Carnegie was building libraries all over New York.''

No longer doing constant battle for subsistence-level funding, library executives say they now count on steady support from elected officials. They are also benefiting from the improved economy.

''There's a high point in funding in part because Wall Street is doing so well,'' said Martin Gomez, executive director of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Libraries are being updated for an era in which data ports are as vital as dust jackets. But the work goes beyond electrical risers and telecommunication lines. It involves reclaiming architectural features that have been lost for generations, like the two-story atrium in the Brooklyn Public Library's Flatbush branch on Linden Boulevard, which was carved up 30 years ago to accommodate air-conditioning equipment.

It also involves the creation of generous new spaces, like the glass-enclosed stairway cascading through the Flushing branch or the cavernous rotunda at the heart of the William D. Walsh Family Library on Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in the Bronx.

The goal is more than esthetic satisfaction and spiritual uplift. A wide-open space tends to demystify the building, allowing users to orient themselves quickly and figure out where to go to get what. Another advantage is security. Such spaces make it easier for the staff to keep watch on visitors and collections.

Libraries are also being redesigned to acknowledge that they are, in a sense, competing with the likes of Barnes & Noble, which has made homey seating nooks and espresso machines an increasingly integral adjunct to reading.

Butler Library at Columbia University is to get a student lounge as part of the $20 million second phase of its 10-year renovation. The lounge will be in Room 233, originally designed as the business school library but used in recent years as a cataloguing center. On one side will be an E-mail ''bar,'' where students can pick up electronic messages, and on the other will be the entrance to a coffee bar. Between them will be cafe tables and banquettes for group studying.

''Even though the students all have access to the network from their rooms, they want to be in the libraries,'' said Kristine N. Kavanaugh, Columbia's assistant vice president for libraries and academic computing. She was not alone in noting the libraries' enduring social function in the technological age.

''Cyberspace is pretty arid,'' said Brian J. Byrne, vice president for administration at Fordham, which is to dedicate the $54 million Walsh Library next month. ''Learning is communal. You have to have a sense of place.''

Creating a sense of place is one goal of the $25 million renovation planned at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, which has been hiding in plain sight at Lincoln Center for three decades. Unknown to most of the millions who pass below, the deep roof slab of the Vivian Beaumont Theater actually contains the library's stacks, reading and viewing rooms and offices. Broad new windows are to be opened on three sides of the travertine-clad slab as part of the library's first major makeover since its 1965 debut.

''The building is bursting at the seams,'' said Robert Marx, the library's executive director. ''This building was never meant to accommodate 400,000 people a year.'' Sometimes, he said, there are lines of researchers waiting to get into the theater division.

There are lines, too, outside branches of the Brooklyn system, Mr. Gomez said: youngsters arriving after school to use the computers inside, sometimes waiting 90 minutes just for the chance to log on.

''You don't want to turn people away,'' he said. ''But that's a strong statement that we're doing something right and that buildings created at the turn of the century have not only met their demand but are being challenged to meet greater demands.''

Mr. LeClerc said 750,000 people used the new Science, Industry and Business Library at Madison Avenue and 34th Street in its first year. ''New Yorkers want libraries that are well stocked, comfortable and technologically sophisticated,'' he said.

And elected officials, including Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Speaker Peter F. Vallone, Borough Presidents and City Council members have taken notice. The city's Department of Design and Construction said that it spent $21.1 million on 73 library projects in the last fiscal year, almost triple what was spent in the 1990 fiscal year.
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