Gould Memorial Library
2060 Sedgwick Avenue | also 1930 Sedgwick Avenue | University Heights | built 1930
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1895
Jay Gould's daughter Helen Miller Shepard secretly pays for NYU's new library
A $250,000 donation arrived in May 1895 to pay for the main building of NYU's Bronx campus, on the sole condition that the donor stay anonymous. The donor was Helen Miller Shepard, daughter of the railroad magnate Jay Gould, who had been ready to pay for the campus himself before his death late in 1892. Ground was broken on October 19, 1895, and Shepard was not publicly named as the donor until December 1898.
“The only stipulation of the gift was that the donor remain anonymous. The donor was Jay Gould's daughter Helen Miller Shepard…”
Source: Wikipedia
- 1896
Stanford White wins a marble rivalry with his own partner over the library's columns
By September 1896 Chancellor Henry MacCracken wrote that he found it bewildering that $500,000 had been spent before the building was fitted out. He also asked that the reading room get green Connemara marble columns instead of the imitation marble in White's plans. White obtained 16 of them, and boasted that his partner Charles McKim had managed only two for Columbia's Low Library. The scarce marble delayed the building's completion.
“After acquiring 16 columns for the Gould Library, White boasted that McKim had been unable to secure the same material for Columbia's library.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 1900
Stanford White completes the domed Gould Memorial Library as the centerpiece of NYU's Bronx campus
Finished in 1900, the library is laid out as a Greek cross, with an east portico of six Corinthian columns of Indiana sandstone and a copper-tiled saucer dome with an oculus. Inside, a stair hall of 24 Tennessee marble steps, partly inspired by the Golden Staircase of the Doge's Palace, keeps the round reading room out of sight until visitors reach the top.
“A main staircase with 24 Tennessee marble steps ascends from the lower landing to the reading room.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 1921
NYU installs the first busts of its Hall of American Artists in the reading room
The first three busts, of the painters Carroll Beckwith, George Inness and Clinton Ogilvie, went up in August 1921. Others followed, including William Merritt Chase in 1923, Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1925, and James McNeill Whistler and Samuel Morse in 1928. That December the university also dedicated new bronze front doors made in memory of the library's architect, Stanford White.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1950
A museum of clocks and watches opens in the library's basement
The James Arthur Museum of Clocks and Watches opened in the basement in 1950 and ran for at least ten years. Around the same period, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the library hosted pie-throwing contests to raise money for student groups, along with exhibits such as old maps of the Bronx.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1969
Arson guts the library's basement auditorium during a season of campus protests
In April 1969, amid student unrest on NYU's Bronx campus, an arson fire badly damaged the auditorium beneath the reading room; the library above, then holding 300,000 books, was spared. Marcel Breuer rebuilt the auditorium in a brutalist style, stripping its original decoration and walling off the front of the balcony.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1973
Bronx Community College takes over the library after CUNY buys NYU's Bronx campus
With enrollment down 40 percent since 1968, NYU sold the campus to the City University of New York in early 1973 for $62 million, and Bronx Community College moved in that September. The college found the stacks too inefficient to run a library and used the building for assemblies, while the reading room hosted only occasional parties and events.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1982
The library appears on screen in Sophie's Choice, the first of several Hollywood films shot there
Film crews have often used the library and campus; the building is seen in Sophie's Choice from 1982, in the 1999 Thomas Crown Affair and in A Beautiful Mind, released in 2001. Fees from filmmakers, along with grants secured by politicians, helped pay for the building's upkeep as it deteriorated in the late 20th century.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2023
Restorers finish repairing the library's dome and oculus for $18.3 million
By 2015 the advocacy group Save Gould Memorial Library was calling for a full restoration it estimated at $50 million, warning that the deteriorated drum could bring down the dome. Bronx Community College began work in the early 2020s. Repairs to the dome and oculus, costing $18.3 million, and a new $2 million exit stair were both completed in May 2023.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- Gould Memorial LibraryWikipedia
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