Posts tagged with NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

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In High Demand at the Local Library, Spanish for Beginners

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Benjamin Lothson teaching a Spanish class at the Muhlenberg library in Chelsea.Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times
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Philip Curcuru, a student in the class, says he wants to be more fluent in Spanish because he owns a home in Costa Rica.Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

“Hola! Como estas?” Benjamin Lothson, a Spanish teacher, said to his students as his classroom at the Muhlenberg library in Chelsea slowly filled up.

Among the group of students were Sun Ae Song, 65, and her husband, Harry Song, 76, a Korean couple who moved to the United States over 40 years ago and have wanted to learn Spanish for a long time. When the Songs learned that the library was offering a free class for beginners, they jumped at the chance to enroll. Read more…

A Pickup at the Library

Dear Diary:

On a recent Saturday, my sister and I were sitting at a table on the New York Public Library plaza on 42nd Street. A gentleman approached my sister from behind and pointed to her gray hair and then pointed to his own gray hair.

He came forward and repeated this gesture twice more as he faced me, smiling and indicating that he and my sister obviously had something in common.

She ignored him, but it was clearly a new “senior pickup” approach.


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New Cabby Needs Better Map

Dear Diary:

My belief that New Yorkers know it all was sadly modified on a recent visit from Miami.

Leaving the public library, I hailed a taxi and gave the driver my Greenwich Village hotel address. Several minutes went by as he fiddled with the GPS map and then said: “Lady, this is my first day and I don’t know where you are going. Please get out.”

As I exited the cab I wished him good luck, thinking he would certainly need it.


Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

To Mark This Day on the Calendar, Use a Pen From Your Pocket Protector

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The "Dork Diaries'' series of books has sold over 10 million copies in less than four years.

Credit Aladdin, via Associated Press

Even before the celebration at the Great Kills branch of the New York Public Library on Staten Island on Monday, someone had thought up a word to describe it: Adorkable.

What was being celebrated, according to Paula Amore, the information assistant at the library, was National Dork Day.

It was not a legal holiday like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July — banks and post offices (not to mention public libraries like Ms. Amore’s) were open as usual on Monday. And unlike, say, Christmas Day or New Year’s Day — two holidays with consistent, solid, seemingly indisputable names — it may not be National Dork Day but “Be a Dork Day.”

Whatever, as Nikki Maxwell might say in “Dork Diaries,” the series for tweens that has sold more than 10 million copies in less than four years. Ms. Amore said dork day was about self-confidence and self-esteem, about celebrating one’s shortcomings, about not being ashamed of one’s imperfections. The message of dork day, she said, is: “It’s cool to be yourself, no matter what anyone thinks.” Read more…

Staten Island Community Gets Back Its Library, Much Improved

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The new addition to the Stapleton, Staten Island, branch library, which reopened Tuesday after a four-year renovation.Credit Jonathan Blanc/New York Public Library

Finally, post-Hurricane Sandy, Staten Islanders have something to cheer about: Local civic leaders and elected officials joined executives of the New York Public Library on Tuesday in opening the newly renovated Stapleton branch, which, at 12,000 square feet, is now more than double its original size.

The library, at 132 Canal Street, combines the original 4,800-square-foot Carnegie-financed branch built in 1907 with a 7,000-square-foot addition that has reading rooms, lounges, computer access and a community room. Read more…

After Chronicling History, SoHo Artist Is Losing a Vantage Point

Slide Show

In 1990, James Wentzy — a 38-year-old struggling artist, darkroom wizard and self-described SoHo homesteader — learned he had H.I.V. Faced with his own mortality, he decided reluctantly to do something he hated. Work.

“I’ll be dead real soon,” he figured. “No later than the end of ’90. I’ll work real hard so that when I die, it’ll be a relief.”

Building Blocks

How the city looks and feels — and why it got that way.

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Some of Mr. Wentzy's tapes.Credit David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

With that, he began videotaping members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or Act Up, and others as they fought popular indifference and official neglect in the face of the AIDS epidemic. He recorded artists who were living with H.I.V. and AIDS. He produced more than 150 AIDS-related programs for public-access cable television and was the subject of a documentary, “Books of James.” Read more…

A Jay-Z Sighting … in 1939 Harlem

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Original gangster? Some have noted a resemblance to a certain hip-hop mogul (right) in the 1939 photo on the left.Credit Left: Sid Grossman, courtesy New York Public Library; right: Mike Stobe/Getty Images

Yes, the New York Public Library swears, the old photo of the guy who looks scarily like Jay-Z really is an unretouched, un-Photoshopped image from 1939. “We’re 100 percent certain it’s legitimate,” Adenike Olanrewaju, a library spokeswoman, said on Friday. Here’s the original:

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"Harlem Loiterers," 1939.Credit Sid Grossman, courtesy New York Public Library

The photo, the library explains on its Tumblr blog, is “Harlem Loiterers” by the street photographer Sid Grossman (no further details are known about it, unfortunately), and it was stumbled across recently by a curator at the library’s Schomburg Center for Research In Black Culture.

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Brad Pitt? Mark Wahlberg? Neither? Both?Credit Courtesy New York Public Library

This is not unprecedented at the library. In 2011, someone noticed a prisoner in an 1857 photo from the library’s collection who looked kind of like a cross between Brad Pitt and Mark Wahlberg (or so some say).

This kind of thing is bound to happen from time to time with a digital collection of thousands of old photographs and a human brain wired to recognize faces and see similarities.

Perhaps if you browse through the collection you’ll find more?

If you do, let us know.

Welcome the Library’s Sleeping Lions: River and Dale

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River and Dale at rest: the new lions outside the library branch in Riverdale in the Bronx now have names.Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

After a worldwide naming contest, the stone lions snoozing outside the Riverdale branch of the New York Public Library in the Bronx have been officially christened: River and Dale.

The names, to be announced at a reception at the library Friday afternoon, beat out more than 350 other suggestions submitted in person and online from lion-namers as far away as Toronto, England and Australia. Finalists included Patronus and Cupitor and Leo and Rex.

The New York Public Library president, Tony Marx, chose the winning pair. “The enthusiastic response to this contest highlights the deep love and passion people around the globe have for N.Y.P.L. and for libraries in general,” Mr. Marx said in a statement. Read more…

Shh! This Is a Library. And the Sentries Are Sleeping.

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They are not quite as regal as Patience and Fortitude, the famous lions on guard outside the main public library branch on Fifth Avenue. But these two lazy beasts have still been warmly welcomed at the library branch in Riverdale, the Bronx, where they arrived earlier this year.



Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

There was no grand entrance at this library, no sweeping staircase to preside over, and certainly no tourists to pose with for photos.

Maybe that’s why this pair of stone lions was sleeping on the job. Read more…

At a Library, an Outpouring of Support, and New Dolls

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Thea Taube, the children's librarian at the Ottendorfer branch in the East Village, has received several donated American Girl dolls since an article appeared last week about the American Girl doll that library allows children to borrow.


Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Thea Taube — much like the Ottendorfer library’s suddenly famous doll mascot — has been inundated with such an outpouring of love and appreciation lately that she is nearly coming apart at the seams.

“It has been quite a week,” said a harried Ms. Taube, the children’s librarian at the Ottendorfer branch of the New York Public Library, in the East Village.

Readers of an article in The New York Times last week will recognize Ms. Taube as the resourceful children’s librarian who, after she was hired in 2004, rescued an American Girl doll named Kirsten Larson from a storage shelf and began lending it out to girls, elevating Kirsten to mascot status at the branch. Read more…
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