The marble lions know your name before you do. They have been sitting at 476 Fifth Avenue since 1911, watching the city remake itself around them, and pilgrims still climb the long stairs to meet them like devotees approaching a shrine. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia rechristened them Patience and Fortitude in the 1930s, qualities he believed New Yorkers would need to survive the Great Depression. The names stuck. They are arguably the most famous lions in America, and they guard the most beautiful public room in New York City: the Rose Main Reading Room inside the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Main Branch of the New York Public Library.

If you are the kind of traveler who measures cities by their libraries — who finds the holy hush of a reading room more thrilling than any cathedral — this is the pilgrimage. You have probably already been on the Strand pilgrimage and the Morgan Library pilgrimage. Today belongs to the Schwarzman.

The Building That Took Sixteen Years

The land beneath the library used to hold water. From 1842 until the end of the 19th century, the four-acre Croton Distributing Reservoir stood on this block — a forty-foot stone wall containing 20 million gallons of drinking water that arrived by aqueduct from Westchester County. When the city consolidated the Astor Library, the Lenox Library, and the Tilden Trust into the new New York Public Library in 1895, planners needed a site grand enough for what was being attempted. They chose to tear the reservoir down.

It was not easy. Contractor Eugene Lentilhon, who began excavation in June 1899, spent seven weeks tunneling through the reservoir’s twenty-five-foot-thick wall only to discover that the reservoir floor could only be removed with dynamite. Remnants of the reservoir still exist on the library floor today — a Manhattan geological memory hiding beneath the marble.

The architects were a young, then-unknown firm called Carrère & Hastings. John Mervin Carrère and Thomas S. Hastings beat out McKim, Mead & White in the 1897 competition, and what they produced — a Beaux-Arts temple measuring 390 feet north-to-south and 270 feet east-to-west — was the largest marble building ever built in the United States at the time. The cornerstone was laid on November 10, 1902. The library would not open for another nine years.

President William Howard Taft presided over the opening ceremony on May 23, 1911, alongside Governor John Alden Dix and Mayor William Jay Gaynor. Roughly 15,000 guests attended. The final cost was $9 million. By the next morning, when the doors opened to the public, an estimated 250,000 people would visit the library in its first week. The building had cost $5.2 million from Andrew Carnegie alone — a sum that was the largest individual gift in library history at the time.

Carrère himself never saw it finished. He died before the building opened, and in March 1911, 2,000 mourners viewed his coffin inside the rotunda of the building he had designed. Both architects’ busts now sit at the base of Astor Hall’s two grand staircases, where every pilgrim passes them on the way in.

The First Book Ever Called For

On opening day, the first call slip was filed at 9:08 a.m. The reader was waiting for N. I. Grot’s Nravstvennye idealy nashego vremeni — “Ethical Ideas of Our Time” — a Russian-language study comparing Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo Tolstoy. He received it seven minutes later. This is the moment that a pilgrim should pause over: the first thing this library ever did, as a working library, was deliver a difficult book about moral philosophy in under ten minutes to a reader who asked for it. That is the entire promise of the New York Public Library, fulfilled in seven minutes, and still fulfilled every day.

The Rose Main Reading Room

Go up the stairs. Past Astor Hall. Up again. Through the McGraw Rotunda — where Edward Laning’s mid-century murals depicting the history of the recorded word run along the walls — and into Room 315. This is the Rose Main Reading Room, and you will know immediately that you have entered something different.

The room is 78 feet wide, 297 feet long, and 52 feet high. Two long city blocks of oak tables, brass lamps, allegorical ceiling murals, and arched windows on both sides. A single room the length of a football field, where strangers come to write novels and prepare dissertations and read newspapers and grieve quietly and look up things they could probably look up on their phones but choose, instead, to look up here.

Originally just the “Main Reading Room,” it was renamed in 1998 after a $15 million gift made the first restoration possible. Davis Brody Bond led that work, cleaning the ceiling, refinishing the wood, replacing the iconic green-shaded desk lamps. The room reopened on November 16, 1998.

Then on a quiet morning in May 2014, a piece of the ceiling fell. One of the ornamental plaster rosettes dropped 52 feet to the empty floor below. No one was hurt. The library closed the room immediately. What followed was a $12 million restoration overseen by Tishman Construction — every rosette was secured with steel cables hidden in the plaster, LED fixtures replaced the old lamps, and the Bill Blass Public Catalog Room next door received a full mural restoration by EverGreene Architectural Arts. The Reading Room reopened on October 5, 2016.

The dropped rosette is the kind of detail a pilgrim needs to hear before walking in. It changes how you look up.

What Lives Here

The General Research Division has approximately 2.5 million volumes in the stacks under the building, and in stacks under Bryant Park immediately to the west. That second set of stacks is a story in itself: between 1988 and 1991, the library built more than 84 miles of bookshelves under Bryant Park, doubling the storage capacity at a cost of $24 million. The lawn you sit on in summer is, structurally, the roof of a library.

Beyond the General Research Division, the Schwarzman holds eight special collections worth crossing a continent for:

• The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature — more than 35,000 works from 400 authors, established in 1940 with a donation from Dr. Albert Berg in memory of his brother Henry. This is where literary scholars come to handle the actual notebooks, drafts, and letters of writers from Dickens to Kerouac.
• The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle — roughly 25,000 works tied to English Romanticism. Donated in 1986 by the estate of oil financier Carl Pforzheimer. The “circle” includes Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas Love Peacock.
• The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division — created in 1898 and now holding more than 20,000 atlases and 433,000 sheet maps, some dating to the 16th century.
• The Manuscripts and Archives Division — over 5,500 collections, including 700 cuneiform tablets and 160 illuminated medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.
• The Rare Book Division — by appointment only. Holdings include the first Gutenberg Bible brought to America, the first Bible printed in the United States, the first Bible in a Native American language, first editions of Shakespeare, Walt Whitman’s personal copies of his own work, and the entire body of Voltaire’s writings.
• The Dorot Jewish Division, founded in 1897.
• The Irma and Paul Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History and Genealogy — one of the largest publicly available genealogical collections in North America.
• The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs — created in 1987, with more than one million works of art.

And in the Children’s Center on the ground floor: the original stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, and Piglet that belonged to Christopher Robin Milne. The library acquired them in 1987. They have lived here longer than they ever lived in England.

Who Worked Here

The Schwarzman is the working office of generations of American writers and thinkers. The list of patrons who used the Main Reading Room as their de facto study reads like a syllabus of the 20th century: Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Frank McCourt, John Updike, Isaac Bashevis Singer, E. L. Doctorow, Tom Wolfe, Somerset Maugham. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis researched here. Francis Ford Coppola researched here. Helen Hayes, Marlene Dietrich, Lillian Gish, Princess Grace Kelly, and Diana Rigg all used the collections.

Norbert Pearlroth, the researcher for Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, read an estimated 7,000 books per year here from 1923 to 1975 — fifty-two consecutive years of daily research. Edwin Land worked here on the studies that led to the Polaroid camera. Chester Carlson read papers on photoconductivity and electrostatics in the General Research Division before he invented the Xerox photocopier. During World War II, American military analysts cracked a Japanese cipher built around a Mexican phone book whose last remaining copy in Allied hands was housed at the Main Branch.

How to Visit Like a Pilgrim

Address: 476 Fifth Avenue, at 42nd Street, Manhattan. The main entrance faces Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd. Look for the lions.

Transit: The 7, B, D, F, and M trains all stop at Bryant Park (42nd St). The 4, 5, 6, S, and 7 trains stop at Grand Central, two blocks east. Walking from Grand Central along 42nd Street is the most cinematic approach.

Hours (per nypl.org): The Schwarzman Building is open Monday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Check the official site at nypl.org/locations/schwarzman the morning of your visit for closures.

Free. Always free. That is the point. You do not need a card to enter. You do not need a card to sit in the Rose Main Reading Room and write all afternoon. Bring a notebook. Bring a question.

What to pair it with: Walk through Bryant Park behind the library — you are now standing above 84 miles of bookshelves. Cross the park to the New York Public Library Shop for the only piece of merchandise that matters. Then walk five blocks south to the Morgan Library & Museum at 225 Madison (36th and Madison) — the city’s other great research temple. The two pilgrimages bracket midtown’s literary geography.

Why It Matters

The Schwarzman is not a museum. It is a working research library that has functioned, every day for over a century, on a single radical premise: that anyone — without proof of address, without payment, without explanation — can walk in off Fifth Avenue, request a book that exists nowhere else in the city, and sit in a beautiful room and read it. Forty-three million items in more than 430 languages stand behind that promise. So do the lions.

Patience and Fortitude. Whichever quality New York requires of you this year, they have it ready.