Chatham Square Library
33 East Broadway | Two Bridges | built 1903
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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.
- 1902
City buys the East Broadway lot for a Carnegie library to replace a busy storefront branch
The library's predecessor was a storefront at 22 East Broadway, across the street, which during its four years handled as many as a thousand volumes a day. In 1902 the city bought the lot at 33 East Broadway from Mr. and Mrs. Herman Gersten for $63,000 and tore down the brick building on it. The new library and its equipment cost $83,184. Carnegie's grant paid for construction, but the city had to supply the land.
- 1903
Chatham Square Branch opens to a mostly Jewish neighborhood
The branch opened on November 2, 1903, with a ceremony in its assembly room attended by neighbors. Speakers included Borough President Jacob Cantor and Arthur Bostwick, chairman of the library's circulating department, who said readers here borrowed less fiction than at any other branch and twice as many scientific books. Librarian H. M. Steinberger and ten assistants ran it, and the shelves held the history, English literature and philology that the largely Jewish community favored.
- 1903
McKim, Mead & White's first Carnegie library puts reading rooms on three floors
Chatham Square was the first of twelve Carnegie branches designed by McKim, Mead & White. The limestone building has a rusticated ground floor and oversize Ionic columns on the upper stories. Inside, children had the first floor, where plaster casts of classical sculpture were given in memory of Emily Binsse, adults borrowed books on the second and read on the third, and the shelves were open to the public. A custodian lived in the fourth-floor apartment until 1969.
- 1947
Library proposes to demolish the branch for a smaller one in the Smith Houses
In 1947 the New York Public Library proposed tearing down the Chatham Square Branch and building a smaller one inside the planned Al Smith Houses, reasoning that it duplicated the nearby Seward Park Branch. The New York City Housing Authority rejected the idea the same year, and the building went on operating as a library without a break. Interior rehabilitation followed by 1958, and a large third-floor meeting room was added in 1971.
- 2001
Landmarks Commission designates the branch as East Broadway becomes the heart of Chinatown
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the library on November 13, 2001, after a hearing at which three people testified in favor, including representatives of the library and the Historic Districts Council. The report calls it the third Carnegie branch to open in New York City and notes that East Broadway now lies in the heart of Chinatown. It says the branch today primarily serves a Chinese American and immigrant population.
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