Central Library Audio Tour: Second Floor

Episode Transcript

You are listening to the Brooklyn Public Library audio tour of the Central Library. I am Norman Erickson and I have been a librarian here at the Central Building for over 30 years. I have led tours of the buildings for patrons and staff for many, many years. Now we are bringing you a bit of that tour in a self-guided audio format. This part of the tour includes the balcony, the Business & Career Center, Society, Sciences & Technology, and the History, Biography & Religion divisions, which are all located on the Second Floor. Feel free to walk around as you listen.

You'll see in front of you the History, Biography & Religion department. The History, Biography & Religion collection is obviously biographies, history, religion. But if you want to travel somewhere, we've got an excellent collection, travel books in here. In this room, hanging on the wall are a series of postcards from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Collection. You'll see the water tower that was torn down in 1935 up there, as well as a few other photographs. Now, as we walk across the balcony, the balcony spaces were finished off in 1955. They were used as occasional programing and exhibition spaces.

As part of the second floor balcony Students Room, there was a book delivery system. This was where a pneumatic tube system was installed that came out somewhere on second floor—we haven't found the location yet—that went down to the decks, down to deck four, deck three and deck two. And what it is, is when a book was called for, instead of carrying it up a set of stairs or putting it on the book elevator, which only went to the first floor from the deck, they would put them in a container and put it into a series of tubes. The air would bring the box up to the second floor, then you would open up the large case and then you would take the book out. Now, because of the air pressure of the pneumatic tube system, some of the older materials could get damaged, according to Mr. Peter Mayland, who was the assistant chief of the Central Library building for many years until he retired in 1995, e remembers in the 1970, sometimes a book, the opening it up and you getting a face crumbs because the pressure destroyed the book and it would blow up in the container. The blower system units are still in the building. They're located down in the decks and parts of the tube delivery system are still in places located down in the decks.

For walking across the balcony. As you look to your left, you see an empty space. Originally, this housed the Brooklyn Collection, and during COVID, we finished the negotiations and merged with Brooklyn Historical Society, which is located downtown in Pierrepont Street, and it's now for the Center for Brooklyn History. It's the largest collection of materials on the history of Brooklyn. When you get a chance to go down and take a look at their building.

The balcony spaces originally was the Teen Room, and then when that moved back downstairs, this also became our Audiovisual Department. It had 16 millimeter films. It had slides, cassettes, film strips, vinyl records, videotapes, then we added CDs and DVDs. CDs and DVDs still exist. Vinyl just came back. Everything else no longer exists. They also were in charge of maintaining all the audiovisual equipment that we use by our branches for programing. 

These spaces were rearranged and reconfigured many times. At one point, the Education Job Information Center was located in the center. Again, part of the renovations to 2020 created the new Business & Career Center, which was originally the Business Library, which was located downtown at Cadman Plaza. The Business & Career Center moved up here in 2016. Their space has been completely redone. It is now houses meeting rooms for the public. The Business & Career Center, they offer many different programs and events to help people find a job, create a new business again. Check the website. You'll find out what's going on in there.

As we walk past the Business & Career Center, you'll notice a staircase that'll take us upstairs to the third floor. We'll come back to that. We're going to walk through this doorway here. We're into that what we call now Society, Ssciences & Technology. This is where you want to go. If you want to find cookbooks, you'll want to do various school assignments are here, books on medicine, or a number of things.

This space in 1955, was a carpentry shop. The carpentry shop maintained and repaired our furniture. When the space was renovated in 1955, the carpentry shop was moved downstairs into the subbasement in the rear wing.

We now going to exit Society, Sciences & Technology, and we're going to walk up this staircase. 

This is the end of the fifth stop on BPL's Central Audio Tour. The next and last stop on our tour is the third floor. Just outside the Art & Music department on the third floor, you'll find a small blue plaque with a QR code that you can scan when you're ready to listen to the next installment. Or, you can navigate to our web page to find the next stop.

This tour was narrated by Norman Eriksen, and conceived by Norman Eriksen and LaCresha Neal. It was produced by Virginia Marshall, LaCresha Neal, Jennifer Proffitt, and Laurie Elvove, with help from Natiba Guy-Clement, Brynna Ververs, Caroline Hartman, and Mary Dickson.