Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (No. 5)
The Bill Blass Public Catalog Room, also located in Room 315, is adjacent to the Main Reading Room, connecting it with the McGraw Rotunda. The Catalog Room's central location between the McGraw Rotunda and Main Reading Room makes it a de facto foyer for the latter. The room measures 81 by 77 feet (25 by 23 m). Similar to the Main Reading Room, it has a 52-foot-high ceiling. Four chandeliers, of identical design to those in the Main Reading Room, hang from the ceiling.The ceiling of the Public Catalog Room also contains a 27-by-33-foot (8.2 by 10.1 m) section of James Wall Finn's 1911 mural.
Possibly the first renovation of the Catalog Room occurred in 1935, when its ceiling was repainted. Further modifications occurred in 1952 when metal cabinets replaced the original oak cabinets as a result of the catalog room's quick expansion, with 150,000 new catalog cards being added each year. The Catalog Room was restored in 1983 and renamed for Bill Blass in 1994.
There is an information desk on the north side on the room, on one's right side when entering from the rotunda. Originally, visitors would receive card slips with numbers on them and then be directed to one of the Main Reading Room's halves based on their card number. The Public Catalog Room also contains waist-high oak desks. These desks contain computers that allow New York Public Library cardholders to search the library's catalog.
The Main Branch's Deborah, Jonathan F. P., Samuel Priest, and Adam R. Rose Main Reading Room, officially Room 315 and commonly known as the Rose Main Reading Room, is located on the third floor of the Main Branch. The room is 78 by 297 feet (24 by 91 m) with a 52-foot-high ceiling, nearly as large as the Grand Central Terminal's Main Concourse. It was originally described as being in the Renaissance architectural style, but is now considered to be of a Beaux-Arts design.The Main Reading Room was renovated and renamed for the Rose family in 1998–1999; and further renovations to its ceiling were completed in 2016. The room became a New York City designated landmark in 2017.
The room is separated into two sections of equal size by a book-delivery desk that divides the space horizontally. The desk is made of oak and is covered by a canopy, with arches held up by Tuscan columns. The north hall leads to the Manuscripts and Archives Reading Room, while the south hall leads to the Art and Architecture Reading Room; picture taking is only allowed in a small section of the south hall.
The Main Reading Room is furnished with low wooden tables and chairs, with four evenly-spaced brass lamps on each table. There are two columns of tables in each hall, separated by a wide aisle. Originally, there were 768 seats, but the number of seats has been reduced over the years to 624. Each spot at each table is assigned a number so that library staff can deliver books to a given seat number. The room is also equipped with desktop computers providing access to library collections and the Internet, as well as docking facilities for laptops. Readers may fill out forms requesting books brought to them from the library's closed stacks, which are delivered to the indicated seat numbers. There are special rooms named for notable authors and scholars who have used the library for research. Surrounding the room are thousands of reference works on open shelves along the room's main and balcony levels, which may be read openly. At the time of the library's opening, there were about 25,000 freely accessible reference works on the shelves. There are three levels of bookshelves: two on the main floor beneath the balcony, and one on the balcony.
Massive windows and grand chandeliers illuminate the space.There are eighteen grand archways, of which fifteen contain windows: nine face Bryant Park to the west, and six face east. The other three archways form a wall with the Public Catalog Room to its east, and the middle archway contains windows that face into the Catalog Room. There are two rows of nine chandeliers in the Main Reading Room. These were originally fitted with incandescent light bulbs, an innovation at the time of the library's opening, and were powered by the library's own power plant. The lights on the chandeliers are arranged like an inverted cone, with four descending "tiers" of light bulbs.
The ceiling is composed of plaster that is painted to emulate gilded wood, with moldings of classical and figurative details. The Klee-Thomson Company plastered the ceiling. According to Matthew Postal, the moldings include "scroll cartouches bordered by cherubs, nude female figures with wings, cherub heads, satyr masks, vases of fruit, foliate moldings, and disguised ventilation grilles." The moldings frame a three-part mural, created by James Wall Finn and completed in 1911. Though no clear photographs exist of the mural's original appearance, the mural in its present incarnation depicts clouds and sky. When the ceiling was restored in 1998, the original mural was deemed to be unsalvageable, and instead, recreations were painted by Yohannes Aynalem. The ceiling was restored again from 2014 to 2016.
The doorways into the Main Reading Room contain large round pediments, which contrast with the smaller triangular pediments in the branch's other reading rooms. There is intricate detail on the room's smaller metalwork, such as doorknobs and hinges. The floors of both the Main Reading Room and the Catalog Room are composed of red tiles, with marble pavers set in between the tiles, which indicate how the furniture should be arranged. The marble pavers demarcate the boundaries of the aisles.
