The Open Book on Grand Army Plaza: A Pilgrim’s Guide to Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library

Stand at the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway and look northwest. You will see one of the most deliberately intentional buildings in all of New York City — a limestone structure whose very silhouette, when viewed from above, traces the shape of an open book. The spine faces Grand Army Plaza. Two wings splay outward like pages unfolding onto Eastern Parkway and Flatbush Avenue. This is not coincidence. This is architecture as declaration.

The Central Library of Brooklyn Public Library has been many things in its long, complicated, heroic life: a pigeon roost mocked in the press, a Civil Defense bomb shelter, a repository for the clipping files of a dead newspaper, a place where 400,000 books arrived before the building was even fully open to the public. It has been all of these things, and it has endured all of them. Since February 1, 1941 — the date it first opened its doors — it has been, above everything else, Brooklyn’s home library. For the literary pilgrim, it is an essential stop not because it is old or beautiful, though it is both, but because it contains within its walls a living argument about what cities owe their readers.

The Building That Almost Wasn’t

The story of how this library came to exist is, in some ways, a story about Brooklyn’s stubbornness. The site at Grand Army Plaza was selected in 1905. Groundbreaking occurred on June 5, 1912, with Mayor William Jay Gaynor in attendance. What followed was nearly three decades of delay, political infighting, funding crises, World War I, the Great Depression, and a single Flatbush Avenue wing that sat unfinished and roofless for so long that children sailed model boats in the flooded foundations and, according to one account cited in the building’s Wikipedia history, a boy reportedly drowned there.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called the site “the most expensive pigeon roost in the world” in 1938. By then, the BPL’s own directors had labeled the unfinished structure “a monument to municipal procrastination.” The half-built ruin was variously known as the “Pigeon Palace,” the “Roman Ruins of Brooklyn,” and a “hideous old wreck.” A full two-thirds of Brooklyn residents might have been excused for assuming their central library would never arrive.

What rescued it was a combination of New Deal funding, a new design, and a Borough President named Raymond Ingersoll who simply refused to let it die. In 1935, Ingersoll announced that architects Alfred Morton Githens and Francis Keally had reimagined the building entirely, scrapping Raymond Almirall’s grandiose Beaux-Arts scheme — with its four floors and massive dome — in favor of something sleek, horizontal, and decidedly modern: Art Deco. The Public Works Administration approved $2.5 million in federal funding in June 1938. Construction recommenced. The building opened, on the first floor only, on February 1, 1941. The second floor would not open until 1955. The third floor waited until the 1970s. But it opened. That is the point. It opened.

The building was eventually named the Ingersoll Memorial Library, after the Borough President who had championed it; Ingersoll died in 1940, the year before the doors finally swung wide. He never saw the queues of patrons who, within two weeks of opening, had borrowed so many books that the BPL was forced to impose lending limits. He never saw what his stubbornness had created. But it bears his name, and rightly so.

The Façade: Fifteen Figures and a Ship’s Mast

Before you enter, stand on the front steps and study the building. Not just glance at it — study it. The concave main entrance, set into Indiana limestone, is fifty feet high. Gilded bronze columns flank the doors, the work of sculptors Thomas Hudson Jones and C. Paul Jennewein, depicting the evolution of art and science through the ages. Above the doors, in gilded bas-relief, are fifteen figures from American literature as it was understood and celebrated in the late 1930s.

Walt Whitman is there — Brooklyn’s own poet, who lived much of his adult life within a mile of this spot, who edited the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1846 to 1848, who was living in Brooklyn when he finalized and first published Leaves of Grass in 1855. The American literary tradition the building was designed to honor begins, in a sense, with him.

But Norman Erickson, a librarian at the Central Building for over thirty years and the narrator of BPL’s official audio tour of the building, points out his own favorite figure: a cockroach and a cat named Archy and Mehitabel, from the short story series written by Don Marquis, a newspaper reporter for The New York Sun. “My favorite,” he says, “which is the one up at the very center.” There is something entirely right about this — a public library whose most exuberant decorative choice is not a saint or a senator but a cockroach and his friend.

Brer Rabbit is also represented, alongside the rest of Whitman’s company in the gilded screen. The text above the doors was composed by Roscoe C.E. Brown, the BPL’s board president from 1940 to 1942.

Then look left, toward the Eastern Parkway flagpole. What appears to be a standard civic flagpole is, in fact, a ship’s mast — salvaged from the yacht Shamrock III, once owned by Sir Thomas Lipton. When the yacht was decommissioned, the mast was relocated here, dedicated on May 30, 1959. This is a library of sea captains and cockroaches, of Whitman and boat races. It is more alive than it first appears.

Into the Grand Lobby

Pass through the doors and the building opens upward. The lobby is three stories tall. The Appalachian white oak paneling that lines the walls has been here since 1941. The space called the Major Owens Welcome Center — where circulation functions happen today — was, in 1941, a coat check room. The building remembers everything.

The lobby’s zinc eagle, hollow but heavy, did not begin its life here. It once stood atop the offices of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in Downtown Brooklyn. When that building was demolished in the 1950s to make way for Cadman Plaza, the eagle passed through the Brooklyn Historical Society, then landed behind the Brooklyn Museum, and finally settled here in the lobby of the Central Library — the last survivor of four such statues that once adorned the Eagle‘s headquarters. Walt Whitman edited that newspaper. The eagle that presided over his work now presides over the library that celebrates him.

The Grand Lobby — officially called the Circulation Hall in 1941 — once housed two brass disks set into the floor, marking the original location of the information desk: one chair for the librarian, one for the patron, a telephone, a lamp. The call slip system that once operated here had a high-tech delivery mechanism: a plastic tube on a string, dropped through a hole in the floor to the basement. A number lit up when your book arrived. The old card catalogs, which once filled the rear half of the lobby, were removed in 1996. The café now operates under the name Emma’s Torch, which provides culinary training for refugees building careers in food service — a library that feeds the borough in more ways than one.

Beneath the first floor, four sub-basement levels descend, numbered in reverse: Deck 4, Deck 3, Deck 2, Deck 1. In the 1941 plans, Deck 1 was considered as a possible subway station. During the Cold War, it was designated a Civil Defense bomb shelter. Erickson has found remnants down there: Civil Defense biscuit tins, water canisters, a generator. Also in the lower levels: the morgue — a newspaper term for the archive of clipping files and photographs from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, now fully digitized through BPL’s Brooklyn Newsstand. And a children’s globe, worn smooth by decades of small fingers, with New York City and Los Angeles rubbed entirely away.

The Collections: Where Brooklyn Reads Itself

At 352,000 square feet, the Central Library holds over 1.7 million materials and welcomes more than a million annual visitors. It is a selective Federal Depository for government publications. Its languages, literature, and fiction division — which you reach through the archway off the Grand Lobby — is among the most heavily used spaces in the building.

The literary pilgrim has particular reason to seek out the Brooklyn Collection, which holds more than a million individual items: Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia, archives from the Brooklyn Eagle, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and ephemeral material that preserves the borough’s memory. This is where the research lives — where the connection between Brooklyn’s landscape and its literary output becomes something you can hold in your hands.

The Center for Brooklyn History, now a branch of Brooklyn Public Library, is housed separately at its Pierrepont Street location in Brooklyn Heights — the former Brooklyn Historical Society, founded in 1863 as the Long Island Historical Society. Its reading room in the Othmer Library is a research destination in its own right, and its early roster of speakers included Horace Greeley, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Julia Ward Howe. But its connection to the Central Library is direct: when the Brooklyn Historical Society merged with BPL in 2020, the borough’s institutional memory was at last housed under one umbrella.

Brooklyn Public Library also maintains one of the most remarkable literary walking tours in New York City — downloadable via the Otocast app, free, entirely outdoors, covering roughly two hours of walking. The tour features stops connected to Walt Whitman, Betty Smith, Arthur Miller, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marianne Moore, Richard Wright, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Maurice Sendak, Jay-Z, and dozens of others. It is a testament to how thoroughly literature has always lived in Brooklyn’s streets, not only its institutions.

The Literary Neighborhood

The Central Library occupies a charged corner of Brooklyn. To the west, Grand Army Plaza opens onto Prospect Park, whose 585 acres of Olmsted and Vaux landscape have provided writers with a green counterweight to the city’s density for more than a century. The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch at the plaza’s center faces the library’s main entrance directly — a conversation in stone between civic memory and civic learning.

The neighborhood immediately surrounding the library spans Park Slope to the south, Prospect Heights to the north, and Crown Heights to the east. Park Slope’s brownstone blocks have housed generations of writers, editors, and publishing professionals. The Saturday greenmarket at Grand Army Plaza, held from spring through November, draws the same crowds who visit the library — parents with children, solitary readers, the whole literate borough mixing in the open air.

Within walking distance: Cafe con Libros at 724 Prospect Place, an Afro-Latinx owned intersectional feminist bookstore and coffee shop — one of the borough’s most distinctive reading environments. Terrace Books on Prospect Park West. The Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden share the library’s block, making a combined visit of astonishing cultural density possible in a single afternoon.

Betty Smith, whose 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn remains one of the borough’s defining literary documents, grew up frequenting Brooklyn’s public libraries. The library in her novel — the one her heroine Francie Nolan visits and where she discovers “the world was hers for the reading” — was based on the Leonard Branch in Williamsburg. But the Central Library, which opened just two years before Smith’s novel was published, embodies the same institution Francie sought: a place where a child with no money and a hunger for everything could walk through the doors and be taken seriously.

The 46-Day Capture Window

Getting There

The Central Library is located at 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11238. The 2 and 3 trains stop at Grand Army Plaza station, directly in front of the library. The B and Q trains stop at 7th Avenue (Park Slope), a ten-minute walk. Buses serving the area include the B41, B67, and B69. The library is fully wheelchair accessible.

Pair your visit with: the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket (Saturdays, 8am–3pm, spring through fall); the Brooklyn Museum, directly east on Eastern Parkway; the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; and Cafe con Libros at 724 Prospect Place for coffee, books, and a distinctly Brooklyn reading atmosphere before or after.

A Building That Insisted on Being Built

The Central Library opened with 460,000 books in 1941, in a borough of some 2.7 million people. Within two weeks, so many patrons had come that the library had to limit how many books a person could borrow at once. The staff shortage was so severe the building could only operate four to seven hours a day. By the beginning of 1942, it was operating eleven hours a day on weekdays. The city had wanted this library for half a century. The moment it opened, Brooklyn proved the point.

For the literary pilgrim, the Central Library is not a monument. It is a living institution with a living argument at its center: that reading is not a luxury, that access to books is not a privilege, that a public library open to all — the immigrant, the child, the working stiff, the scholar — is the condition of a literate city. Brooklyn spent nearly thirty years and a great deal of civic embarrassment learning that lesson. The building at Grand Army Plaza is what it looks like when a city finally gets it right.

Stand on the front steps before you go in. Look up at Archy the cockroach and Whitman in gilded bronze. Read the inscription above the doors. Then go inside, through the archway, into Languages, Literature and Fiction. The world is still yours for the reading.

Sources: Brooklyn Public Library — Central Library; Central Library History; Central Library Audio Tour: Plaza; Central Library Audio Tour: Grand Lobby; Brooklyn Literary Audio Walking Tour; Center for Brooklyn History; Wikipedia, “Central Library (Brooklyn Public Library)”

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