Even as a taxi-driving college dropout I was attracted to the library’s creaky, old-shoe character. I went in to join in the early 1970s wearing a ponytail and army pants. Behind the desk was Helen Ruskell, to me a bit scary, kind of a battle ax. She looked at me doubtfully, and with good reason: Since 1920 she had been a gatekeeper of an institution that predated the public library system by more than a century.
The library was first quartered in City Hall, at Wall and Broad Streets, and it often claims to have been the first library of Congress, as congressmen borrowed its books when New York was the nation’s capital, from 1789 to 1790. Although Columbia College was also founded in 1754, I have discovered no other library, museum or similar organization predating this peculiar institution.
By the mid-19th century the library flowered into a full-fledged literary organization, with lectures by Poe, Emerson and others, and in 1856 put up a new home on University Place, then a smart residential address.
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Members began moving uptown and having their books delivered, and the library’s literary aspirations faded. In 1937 it relocated to its present 1917 town house on East 79th Street, after shelves were installed in the gutted shell of the back half. That was the institution guarded by Miss Ruskell when I arrived, a wonderful but musty book-lending operation for polite private school families, although anyone could come to the first-floor reference room and consult any book.
The NY Society Library is located on E. 79th St.
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