Did you know that the location of the New York Public Library, the big main branch at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, used to be the site of a reservoir, a massive 19th-century structure with 50-foot-high, 25-foot-thick granite walls and pooled municipal drinking water "full of tadpoles and animalculae"? Or that behind the library, just outside in Bryant Park now, sits an awesome little sculpture of Gertrude Stein? Or that, heard a certain way, the impact of a pencil falling to the floor in the Rose Reading Room—the heart of the library and maybe the greatest enclosed space of any kind in New York—can sound for a fleeting moment like the... More >>>