Billionaire Gives $100M Gift To Library
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The billionaire co-founder of the Blackstone Group, Stephen Schwarzman, is donating $100 million to the New York Public Library for a dramatic transformation of its flagship Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. When construction is completed, around 2014, the building, currently known as the Humanities and Social Sciences library, will be renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the New York Times reported on its Web site on yesterday evening.
The renovation will turn the facility on Fifth Avenue, traditionally a haunt for scholars, into a popular destination, combining research collections and a circulating library. The research collections will be moved into new high-density stacks underground, making room for a multi-level, light-filled lending library. The new library will replace the Midtown Manhattan branch across the street, which will be sold.
The plan calls for a café and information center to be added to Astor Hall and wireless Internet to be installed throughout the building. New hub libraries, based on the successful Bronx Library Center, which opened in 2005, will be constructed in Northern Manhattan and Staten Island.
Mr. Schwarzman’s donation is the lead gift toward what will ultimately be a $1 billion project. The library described it as the largest ever unrestricted gift by an individual to a cultural institution in New York City.
Asked how he expects people to respond to the renaming, the library’s president, Paul LeClerc said: “If you look at the turn of the last century, you had people like Andrew Carnegie putting out huge amount of money to benefit the people. I know that’s what Stephen intends to do.”
The plan grew out of the library’s effort to respond to the information age and the changing needs of its users, as well as its difficulty in attracting support to renovate the Mid-Manhattan branch library, Mr. LeClerc said. The library expects that the renovation will triple the number of people who use the building annually, to 3.5 million.
Mr. LeClerc said the new facility will be “the single most comprehensive library in the world, and it will be open to everyone for free, [from] really young kids to world-class scholars.”
When Blackstone went public last June, Mr. Schwarzman received roughly $677 million in cash and a stake in Blackstone then worth around $7.7 billion.
The week before, he was honored at the library’s annual corporate dinner.
