New York City is full of secret spaces: a hideaway home in a former stable, a Prohibition speakeasy tucked into an outbuilding, a subway tunnel emergency exit concealed behind a townhouse facade. But few such places so capture the imagination as the apartments hidden inside the mansion-like public branch libraries funded more than a century ago by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Is there a voracious reader anywhere, after all, who doesn’t relish the idea of living in a library?
In 1901, Carnegie committed $5.2 million (the equivalent of well over $170 million today) for the construction of dozens of neighborhood libraries on land provided by the city. Designed by powerhouse firms like McKim, Mead & White, more than 60 branches were built across the five boroughs, bringing not only books but architectural grandeur to working-class neighborhoods largely deprived of both. Hidden from the public above the elegantly appointed reading rooms, each library typically contained a modest family apartment for a custodian, who performed the punishing work of stoking its coal-fired furnace around the clock.
In the latter half of the century, these custodial apartments were gradually vacated, as the coal furnaces were replaced and the caretakers retired, the last one around 2005. Over the years, many of the units were converted for new library uses, while the remaining dwellings, left to molder for decades, took on a decrepit, ghostly appearance. Today only seven Carnegie apartments survive intact in the New York Public Library system, all uninhabited.
“The first time I saw a Carnegie apartment, I was just blown away,” said Iris Weinshall, chief operating officer of the New York Public Library, which operates 30 Carnegie branches in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island. “Many of them are almost like haunted houses. It’s a pretty eerie feeling.”
Now, however, four of the abandoned apartments have been re-envisioned and renovated as part of a $176 million, city-funded modernization of five branches in under-resourced neighborhoods: the libraries at Fort Washington and 125th Street in Manhattan, Melrose and Hunts Point in the Bronx and Port Richmond on Staten Island.
Overall, the Carnegie Branch Renovation Program preserved historic features like double-height ceilings and open-plan reading rooms, while upgrading the interiors to maximize public space and installing elevators in two libraries that lacked them. At the two Manhattan branches and Hunts Point, the custodial apartments were transformed into teen centers, while at Port Richmond, the unit became a mechanical room. The Melrose apartment, where a caretaker kept a chirping aviary of hundreds of birds in the 1950s, was lost to fire in 1959.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who grew up in the city’s Carnegie libraries tend to be bookish sorts.
“I can hardly imagine what my life would’ve been like without the experience of living in that library,” said Ronald Clark, 90, who moved into the third floor of the Georgian Revival-style Washington Heights branch as a teenager around 1949. “I was able to have all my questions answered as a young person growing up.”
For example, he said, he was lying in bed one night at about age 15, “thinking about the things that the Bible says about the creation and the things that science, the archaeologists, have found. And I said, well, there seems to be a contradiction. So I got up and went downstairs, turned on one of the reading lights, and got out the Bible, laid it out, went to Reference, got an encyclopedia, and I read both of them and realized they were both saying exactly the same thing.” That discovery, he added, “set me off on a search for all the scientific and spiritual connections that I could find.”
Mr. Clark studied science at the City College of New York, becoming the first in his family to earn a degree. After performing classified work for the United States government in Nuremberg, Germany, he moved back to live with his custodian father, Raymond Clark, in the Washington Heights library. There he raised and home-schooled his daughter, Jamilah, for several years.
In the evenings, Ms. Clark would accompany her grandfather downstairs to the children’s floor, where he had her sit on a table.
“He would be sweeping and mopping, and I would just sit up there and either read books, or they had a little television down there, so sometimes I would watch ‘The Electric Company,’” she said. “Being that the library was closed, it was my own little paradise that I had all to myself.”
Ms. Clark’s father kept the library as his home base until her grandfather retired sometime around the late 1970s. In 2016, the apartment was renovated and reconfigured as a 3,750-square-foot teen area and adult education center.
“Living in a library taught me that anything was possible,” Ronald Clark said, so when he got it into his head to design and build a sailboat, he headed down to the stacks to teach himself marine engineering. The books there taught him how to construct a 34-foot sloop with a hull made of ferrocement, which he troweled onto a steel and mesh armature at a Bronx shipyard.
When the boat was finished some 10 years later, he sailed it alone to Cape Cod, where he now lives. Today he is president of the local chapter of Concerned Black Men of America, a mentoring organization, where he plans to launch a program to teach young people to build boats.
Life in a library was less idyllic for Steven Torres, an author of noirish mystery novels, who lived in the Classical Revival-style Tremont branch in the Bronx for four elementary-school years starting in 1977.
The neighborhood was so dangerous that Mr. Torres’s parents rarely let him go outside, so he learned to watch the world from the library windows and roof.
“I think the library shaped me in the sense that I became an observer,” he said. “I couldn’t go out to play with people, but I did witness one guy get the living snot beaten out of him on Halloween because he wouldn’t give up his candy.”
He also watched an abandoned building across the street that heroin addicts used as a shooting gallery. Periodically, their mattresses would catch fire, bringing firefighters in their howling trucks.
“It was an interesting biology lesson when prostitutes plied their trade in the area,” Mr. Torres recalled. “A lot of it just happened in cars that parked right in front of the library.”
This early exposure to such seamy goings-on led him later to explore the darker side of life in his novels, he said.
As a child, Mr. Torres’s reading tastes ran to mysteries like Encyclopedia Brown, which he snatched up before the public gained access to them. New books that come in “have to be processed, so they sometimes sit on office shelves for weeks,” he said. “But I could read them because I could come down in the middle of the night.”
Sharon Washington, who grew up in the St. Agnes, Yorkville and Harlem branches, also loved having the run of her own library, but as an adult she found herself focusing more on the struggles of her custodian father. In the 1960s, as a small child living in the St. Agnes branch, on Amsterdam Avenue near 81st Street, she exulted in reading and acting out fairy tales. But later on, she said, when she was writing a one-woman play about her childhood, “what kept coming up was the flip-side of the fairy tale.”
Her show, “Feeding the Dragon,” in which she starred Off Broadway in 2018, drew its title from her childhood memories of watching her father, George King Washington, shovel coal into the St. Agnes furnace. She is now writing a children’s book on the subject for Scholastic.
Her father was a responsible man, Ms. Washington said, but he also had personal problems, and “a lot of it had to do with the stress of that job,” which included the “grueling task” of hauling out great quantities of coal ash.
“This is what almost broke my father,” she added. “To keep a building that size heated and the water hot” required him to stoke and tend the coal fire day and night. “Don’t let that furnace go out” was the family mantra.