The Boston Public Library is like a beached whale, magnificent but going nowhere.
Not only is the BPL the nation’s oldest tax-payer supported municipal library, it is – together with New York – the only city research library ranked along side Harvard, Yale, and the Library of Congress.
A series of headline grabbing revelations, however, suggesting dysfunction and disarray have put a blot on that reputation.
First came the shocker that two prints -- by Dürer and Rembrandt (valued at $660,000) -- were either stolen or mislaid, triggering investigations by the Boston Police and the FBI.
Next, the revelation that a historically significant 19th century pamphlet ($19,000) was consigned to a rummage sale before being rescued by an eagle-eyed library volunteer from the grass roots Friends Of The Public Library.
And today the news that gold coins once nestled in the cornerstone of Copley Square’s 19th century Renaissance-style Palazzo designed by Charles McKim and retrieved during the restoration have gone -- drum roll, please -- missing.
This is the stuff of an occult Dan Brown thriller (“The Copley Kabal”) or a cozy Agatha Christy who dunnit (“Unpleasantness At The Public Library”).
Whatever this episode comes to be called, it has shaken the leadership of the 167-year-old institution, demoralized the staff, attracted the dismay of Mayor Marty Walsh, and triggered a sense of cynical wonder among the public.
It is a day of reckoning that some familiar with the inner-workings of the library have predicted would come.
“The situation is easy to grasp once you understand the fundamentals,” said historian Douglass Shand-Tucci who -- in addition to having written a shelf of work centering on Boston’s essential cultural institutions such as The Gardner Museum, Harvard, and MIT – was half of the two-man team that planned and executed the early restoration of the McKim.
“For whatever reasons,” Shand-Tucci explained, “the city has not been able to give the library the level of funding it requires and deserves. And neither the trustees nor the [Boston Public Library] Foundation have had the wit or will to meaningfully increase the library’s endowment.”
Sinclair Hitchings, the retired curator of prints, made a similar point in conversations we had two years ago about the long-term viability of the library’s special collections in art and architecture, rare books and music, manuscripts and children’s books.
“The library community should be inspired by what The Museum of Fine Arts has done in funding and building its Art of the Americas wing,” said Hitchings.“It was hard work, of course. Some people were skeptical when the plans were announced. But look at what was done, what was accomplished. The library would be capable of doing the same. The only thing holding something like this back is a lack of imagination.”
Hitchings knows his stuff. In the course of his career-long tenure at the BPL, Hitchings built an internationally acclaimed print collection and raised $10 million to support it.
The current library administration is a prisoner of its own fantasies. It pays lip service to being a custodian to a trove of cultural treasurers but largely ignores them hoping they will -- what? -- go away. Or perhaps be sold off? In the meantime, it tries to be all things to all people.
The bottom line is that if the library is going to survive in anything like its current form – no matter how its holdings would be divided or organized, it must find other, outside sources of revenue, such as foundation grants, private donations, and corporate gifts.
That is one of the very clear findings made by Chrysalis Management, the consultants retained by the Walsh Administration to evaluate operational and financial performance of the library and several other city entities.
As the graph below illustrates, other cultural institutions with similar reputations dwarf the endowment of the Boston Public Library.
Hitchings and Shand-Tucci belong to a school of thought that thinks the Boston Public Library as now constituted should be split in two.
On the one hand would be the research library with its special collections and vast scholarly reserves, and on the other the beloved neighborhood branch system, which the late mayor, Tom Menino tried to downsize before retreating in the face of citizen anger.
It is worth noting that the overall restoration of McKim is still unfinished, which might be a source of outrage if only it were widely realized.
Among the many public faces heralding that project were the late Boston Globe publisher William Taylor and former State Senate and University of Massachusetts president William Bulger. As trustees, these two political and cultural opposites, put aside their differences and found common ground in revitalizing the library.
Perhaps Walsh can find inspiration in this chapter of what now seems like ancient history. The right combination of talents just might get that magnificent whale back in the swim.
