In the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia dulbed the twin marble tons guarding the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue Patience and Fortitude. By any standard they would qualify as emblematic of a great cultural resource. But Michael Miscione, the Manhattan borough historian, has suggested something less photogenic but more transformative: Samuel J. Tilden's will. His bequest to establish and maintain a free public library in the city served, Miscione says, “to solidify the city's commitment to literacy, culture and a public-private partnership that enabled New York City to create so many world-class cultural institutions.”Tilden, the son of a patent medicine manufacturer, was a successful corporate lawyer, shrewd investor, political reformer, and anti-slavery Free Soil Democrat who would battle the abuses of Tammany Hall. He was elected governor of New York and in the disputed 1876 presidential campaign against Rutherford B. Hayes won a majority of the popular vote but lost the Electoral College (by one vote). "I can retire to public life." Tilden said, “with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office.”New York had lots of libraries at the end of the nineteenth century, but most charged admission and were privately funded. Tilden left about $2.4 million (almost $100 million in today's dollars), the bulk of his fortune, to "establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York." The Tilden Trust was merged with the Astor (founded by John Jacob Astor, from his furtrading fortune and presided over by Washington Irving) and Lenox (founded by the bibliophile James Lenox) libraries in 1895 to form the New York Public Library. The consolidation- orchestrated by John Bigelow, a lawyer for the Tilden Trust-was hailed, according to the library's official history, as "an unprecedented example of private philanthropy for the public good." Six years later, Andrew Carnegie agreed to donate more than $5 million to establish sixty-five branch libraries under the proviso that they be maintained by the city government. (Brooklyn and Queens are served by separate library systems.)The New York Public Library's $9 million central research library, designed by Carrère and Hastings, opened in 1911 at Fifth Avenue and West Forty-Second Street on the site of the old Croton Distributing Reservoir. At the time, the beaux arts building was the largest marble structure in the United States. The original collection contained more than a million volumes; today it includes more than fifty million books and other items stored on-site, in stacks under Bryant Park and in a warehouse in Princeton, New Jersey. The New York Public is the second-largest public library in the United States (after the Library of Congress) and the world's third-largest. The central research branch has been featured in numerous films, notably Breakfast at Tiffany's, You're a Big Boy Now, and Ghostbusters, and in books, including The Rise of David Levinsky. Tilden never lost faith. Referring to his 1876 defeat, his epitaph reads: “I Still Trust in The People.”TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
