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NYC Crime

New York Public Library staffer struck and killed by car leaving Manhattan garage

A beloved archivist for the New York Public Library was killed last week when a car leaving a Midtown parking garage knocked her to the street, causing her to hit her head against the pavement in a fatal blow.

Kathie Coblentz, 73, was only steps from her home on West 58th St. when she was killed last Saturday. The garage had a steep ramp leading up the street where Coblentz was walking, police said. The driver stayed at the scene and was not charged.

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Co-workers at the NYPL, where she worked for over 50 years, described her has a quintessential New Yorker, delighting in Central Park and the Yankees, as well as her treasured books.

“She spent her entire career here, starting in July of 1969—just weeks before the moon landing. She was recruited right out of library school at the University of Michigan,” NYPL President Anthony W. Marx wrote in an email to staff on Tuesday.

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“She was known as an extremely thorough and vigorous cataloger who took very seriously the responsibility of connecting the public to our collections.”

Supervisor Deirdre Donohue was quoted in the announcement, calling Coblentz the “matriarch of our work family.”

Donohue went on to describe the work Coblentz did as “artisanally-crafted catalog and authority records that were the products of detective work, deep research, and skepticism about facts leading to truly rich description and access of items in the library’s coffers of great value and importance.”

Coblentz loved the letter Christopher Columbus wrote documenting his voyage in 1493, and had told friends it should be reproduced as a scarf. For her 50th anniversary at the library, co-workers had one custom made for her in silk.

She was also an enthusiastic blogger, writing about rare texts in a contemporary way for the library.

“You wouldn’t expect a guy who lived that long ago to be the subject of a Wikipedia war, but so it is,” she wrote last year about Saint John Climacus, a sixth-century Syrian, in a post called “How to Achieve Spiritual Perfection in 30 East Steps.”

She was a fan of Scandinavian murder mysteries and the Yankees. According to Marx, Coblentz learned Swedish, Danish and Norwegian to be able to read the books as they were originally written.

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“She was an astounding person with so much to give and so much intelligence and wit and humor,” said library curator Madeleine Viljoen, who knew Coblentz for 10 years.

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“It’s tragic.”

Viljoen said Coblentz was so dogged in her research that her findings sometimes overturned accepted historical narratives.

“She was the kind of person to make real discoveries during her work,” said Viljoen. “She would keep on digging until she got to the bottom of it.”

Coblentz co-edited books of interviews with Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen and was also an author, having written a guide on organizing home libraries.

She was also the “life of the party,” Viljoen said, perpetually armed with a witty quip.

“She was always right there ready to have a good time. Kathie knew how to work and also how to play.”


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