Summer research begins
With the academic year concluding yesterday I braved the morning rain to get myself up to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street to research my article about Richard Varick. I’m already about 700 words in, which is about 10% percent of what will be the eventual final word count. I intend to submit by Labor Day. I pitched the proposal back in February and have already done quite a bit of research. Now I have to sit down and do it. I had a curious thing happen in the early afternoon when I went to the reference desk to claim my final box of the day. In a coincidence I can’t even begin to describe, another person in the reading room was using the same archival box. That is, of the thousands and thousands of items held in the NYPL Special Collections unit another person submitted a request for today to look at the same item for which I had also submitted a request. Don’t get me wrong. It was no great imposition and the librarian and I had a good laugh about it. I’ll be back at NYPL sometime shortly after Memorial Day and will view it then. Still, what are the odds of that even happening?
Prepping from home this morning with my coffee, I noted too that the iconic Midtown building opened on this date in 1911. President William Howard Taft spoke at the ribbon cutting. I mentioned it to one of the librarians, who said that they had been talking about it earlier in the morning. I actually put in for three books from the basement storage during today’s research trip. Here we see a cross-cut view drawn in 1911 when the library first opened. The library still very much looks this same way.
(images / top New York Times, May 24, 1911; bottom Scientific American, May 27, 1911)