These are not good days at the Boston Public Library. Especially for a historian of Boston Studies like me. The library is my workroom. This – sadly -- means I daily witness the trashing of a building that is arguably the pre-eminent masterwork of three centuries of American architecture. The culprits? The BPL’s own administration.
In the wake of the unfolding saga -- by theft or misplacement -- of two of the library’s significant holdings (prints by Dürer and Rembrandt), I recognize a pattern of parallel abuse of its most intellectually important holdings.
Abuse of the McKim building is, of course, the easiest to identify. Cheap furniture is jammed between the great bronze doors created by Daniel Chester French (sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington); the Abbey Room, internationally recognized as perhaps the single most beautiful room in America, is often piled high with stacked furniture and cartons; the Elliott Room with its grand ceiling mural of "The Triumph of Time" is divided by plasterboard walls that partition the space into cubicles.
Thirty years ago, then library president Kevin Moloney appointed architect Daniel J. Coolidge and me to co-direct the early phases of the McKim Building restoration. So cherished was this building by that generation of Bostonians that the news was front page in the Boston Globe. My job involved doing things like spending weeks contending with unforgiving fire laws, for example, which demanded the replacement of the beautiful old antique wrought iron grilles at the entrance to Bates Hall from the Grand Staircase with fire doors. I have never been happier in my life than the day we persuaded the Fire Department that if the grilles were encased in glass held by an iron frame, we could meld 20th century safety needs with the eloquent 19th century moment of McKim's design.
Now there is cheap plastic lettering glued to the marble doorframe that holds the grilles, disfiguring McKim's work so as to identify "Bates Hall." (Downstairs, where the lettering identifies the "East Elevator", the "s" has come unglued so as to yield "Eat Elevator. I am waiting for, what? Upstairs? "Bats Hall". Why not.). Why this sudden need to identify Bates Hall 120 years later? Don't ask me.
One is told this is temporary, the library administration has boilerplate ready to defend everything, including the issue here, which is warehousing stuff in the old McKim Building from the Johnson Building during its remodeling. But the sense of wrong priorities lies heavy on the air.
In fairness, it must be said the current library administration has had its high points. Choosing The Catered Affair to run the institutions excellent restaurant and function services has proved a very good decision. They bring a style and flair to the use of the building that emphasizes its architectural importance and the libraries historical rank as the world's first public circulating library and America's first tax-supported big-city library.
It is also true that nothing quite prepares anyone for the really unique mission of the BPL, where protecting and exulting in an architectural masterpiece that is part of the national heritage is only the beginning of the task. Another is to protect and enhance a scholarly collection of books and manuscripts that, as author William Martin put it once in Boston magazine includes not only the usual circulating books for the general public but "some of the oldest and most valuable books on the planet."
This mission has never changed. More than a century ago, lamenting a lack of gifts in 1905, the library trustees asserted boldly that "the library must provide the rare volumes . . . in order to retain its high ranking among the libraries of the world". And as recently as 2008, Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough pointed out that the BPL’s collections are such that it is "one of the five greatest libraries in America . . .. The Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Harvard, Yale and the BPL."
In fact, as Walter Muir Whitehill wrote in the BPLs history, it is "(in company with the far larger New York Public Library) one of only two public libraries in the US admitted to membership in the Association of Research Libraries".
But the cheap plastic lettering is just the outward, physical manifestation of misplaced priorities now rampant at the library. Ask about the "research library" and you will be told there is none, just a Central Library that encompasses the popular and scholarly collections. Oh, well.
What we can agree on is that there is virtually no Print Dept. anymore, a good example of how the library’s mission has been hollowed out.
That department, from which the Dürer and Rembrandt have gone missing, has had no department head since A.E. Ryan became BPL president in 2008. The last Keeper of Prints, Sinclair Hitching, a Boston institution, presided over what was years ago the glory of the library, raising millions by the way to endow his department, money now presumably spent elsewhere.
Don't ask where. Only seven years ago, David McCullough grew so concerned about the state of the library’s collections he "floated the idea that the BPL donate the [John] Adams collection to a national institution" that would have the resources to preserve and protect it. Ouch. Is the BPL no longer a national institution? Much work has been done on the collection since then. And despite valiant efforts by The Associates of the Public Library, no one would claim any of the BPLs rare books are a top priority – except to outside do gooders. Which is to repeat my admonition: don't ask where the millions Hitchings raised to administer his collection are now directed.
All I know is that the distraction of the moment is the remodeling of the Johnson building addition, which to be polite, is a highly problematic attempt to model the public library of the future: something like the Faneuil Hall Marketplace is the concept; a sort of community center cum pop library. Whether the idea is to save the library by destroying it, or will end up destroying it to save it, I can't tell. But, again, the priorities are so clearly skewed. The McKim Building and the great collections -- like those of the Print Department -- are the library’s chief mission. Yes, the Children’s Room just opened in the Johnson addition is charming. But it would be charming anywhere.
The Copley Square library is not a neighborhood library. This is Boston, the American intellectual capital as surely as New York is the economic and media capital, and Washington the political capital, and Los Angeles the entertainment capital. The BPL used to be in the same league as the Museum of Fine Arts, MIT, the Boston Symphony, the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard and so on. Historically it still is. But as to resources? No more I fear.
Like my moment about the building with the iron grilles there has been another about the collections. I have secured many collections for the library over the years, including that of the Boston stained glass artist Charles Connick, America's greatest in his medium. When the second part of the gift was made recently I reluctantly endorsed its going to MIT, not the BPL. Why? Its sister collection, which I also secured for the library, is the Ralph Adams Cram Collection, which I was told by the head of the Arts Department recently has been withdrawn from public access. A scholar from Yale who had written me about using the collection was horrified. So was I.
One day during Arthur Curley’s directorship, I remember having an unusually early appointment with him, and I was asked to wait for a moment while he performed what he said was a frequent and necessary ritual. I waited, somewhat impatiently, while he put a call through to the curator of rare books. Not Arthur’s interest really, nor mine, and we had much work to do, but as he explained -- just be patient, Douglass! This, he said, was one of his biggest responsibilities and one he took very seriously. So I waited while he was connected and was surprised to hear him conclude his chat with the remark that he was feeling very Shakespearean that morning and did Miss Monti, the curator, understand what he meant.
Whether or not she did, I didn't. Puzzled, I asked after he hung up what he meant. Well, he said, the only way to keep track of a collection like the BPLs, where books and manuscripts worth a half million (like the Dürer now missing) or a million or five million, like perhaps the First Folio Shakespeare -- which was what he meant by feeling Shakespearean -- was to keep everyone always on the alert by asking to personally see the works on short order. The rare book curator knew Kevin Moloney and Arthur Curley had their priorities in order, and was never surprised to receive such a telephone call.
I would be very surprised to find that this wise policy is still in place.
Douglass Shand-Tucci has been Special Adviser to the Trustees of the Boston Public Library for the Restoration of the McKim Building and has been responsible for the gift to the library of several important collections. The Library published one of his first books, Ralph Adams Cram: American Medievalist in 1976. Now a Visiting Scholar at MIT, his latest book, due out in 2016, is an historical guide to the Institute's campus
