Elizabeth Felicella's Tour of the New York Public Libraries: The New Yorker One way to look at New York City's branch libraries - the eighty-seven in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island that make up the New York Public Library system, and the fifty-eight and sixty-two in the Brooklyn and Queens systems, respectively - would be as two hundred and seven different places you can go to pick up or return books, and maybe read a recent newspaper or search for a job or study after school or go online. Another way you can look at them is as an extensive collection of buildings that, taken together, have a resonance along the lines of the Netherlandish drawings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the Morgan Library, or of the Met's Cézannes. Elizabeth Felicella, an architectural photographer who has spent the past five years shooting all of the city's library branches with a large-format camera, thinks of them as the latter. Soft-spoken and thoughtful, Felicella is excited to point out hidden details when she walks into a library. "This branch is full of little things," she will say. Naturally, she has a soft spot for photos that are featured in the old buildings, like the one of Mayor Lindsay reading to a boy from "Fables of La Fontaine," Marianne Moore's 1954 verse translation of the seventeenth-century French fabulist. "That's in the Ryder Branch, in Brooklyn, and that's a beautiful branch," she says. It's off Ocean Parkway. It's a one-story, white-ceramic-brick library. It's not a perfect rectangle. So the idea was that the odd shape let there be these semi-interior landscaped areas, which were outside but very visible inside. It is very green, very energy efficient, since they were built in the seventies. Felicella has affection for the seventies branches. "Lindsay-era buildings, like the Ryder branch, tend to be lower, smaller," she says. They are by far the underdogs of the system. If I had a wish, it would be that those branches would be restored, though not in a finicky, don't-touch-anything kind of way, because they actually have so much to do with things that are important now. On a recent weekday morning, after making a few adjustments to her exhibit of photos of the Manhattan branches, on display through the summer at the Mid-Manhattan Library (which is slated to be demolished and folded into the Schwartzman building, across the street), Felicella was persuaded to give a tour of all two hundred and seven branches, or as many as she could in a day, with considerations made for traffic and branch hours. "I might make substitutions," she said. An early stop was the Hudson Park branch, where, coincidentally, Marianne Moore worked as a children's librarian in the nineteen-twenties (Moore wrote that she frequently recommended Christy Mathewson's "Pitching in a Pinch" to wannabe Ty Cobbs). A librarian happily escorted Felicella to the disused third floor to see the old caretaker's quarters: a kitchen, a bathroom, empty rooms with peeling paint and curling wallpaper - a page from World of Interiors, except for a tired poster of what looked like Ralph Macchio adorning one wall. "I didn't even realize that libraries had caretakers, until one day I looked into a fuse box and it said "caretaker's kitchen," " Felicella says. That was on East Twenty-third Street, the Epiphany Branch. In the basement auditorium, the librarian said that she had seen logs from the twenties, when neighbors complained about the radicalism of what was discussed at some of the meetings. Today, a Linux-code-writing group meets there. "If you ever get a chance to go to the Port Richmond branch, on Staten Island, there's a beautiful W.P.A. auditorium," the librarian offered. I started at that branch. On Second Avenue, Felicella entered the oldest operating branch in the New York Public Library system - the red brick Ottendorfer branch, known as the Freie Bibliothek und Lesehalle in the eighteen-eighties, when St. Mark's Place was on the edge of Kleindeutschland and its builder, Oswald Ottendorfer, published Staats-Zeitung. "I want to show you something upstairs," Felicella said, hiking up several flights, above the glass-floored landmarked stacks, where verse is a top circulator. "For some reason, we have a lot of fine contemporary poetry," the librarian guiding us said. Up in abandoned rooms, Felicella searched in vain for a relic. "The original sign is maybe in that room," she said. It has the old hours. I think I photographed it. "I'd be curious to see what the hours were," said the librarian. "They were all the time," said Felicella. Driving through Brooklyn is almost too much for Felicella, given the borough's library density. "I'm realizing there are so many branches in this area that we could see," she says. She chooses the Carroll Gardens branch, one of the sixty-seven donated by Andrew Carnegie and established, as the library's executive committee wrote, in 1901, in "conspicuous positions on well frequented streets." The Brooklyn Public Library recently proposed selling the Boerum Hill Carnegie branch, as well as the midcentury Brooklyn Heights branch, and having them replaced with space in new towers. Next stop, the Arlington branch. "My father's branch," Felicella said. It's a Carnegie in Cypress Hills, surrounded by lawn, with a semi-octagonal hooded entrance vestibule as it was in 1906, leading you into a split-level seven-thousand-square-foot space that makes your brain feel focussed. On the second floor, she showed off a shelf that holds books that are assigned to neighborhood students, a copy of "Por Quién Doblan las Campana," alongside its English equivalent, "For Whom the Bells Tolls." "It's a shelf that hold books assigned to students in schools," she says. The other libraries used to do this, but now Brooklyn is the last system. A stop for pasta e fagioli at Gino's, on Cross Bay Boulevard, in Howard Beach. A visit to the Broad Channel branch, a small, cheery, nineteen-nineties prefab building, with books rotating on shelves that pop out of the exterior, like insect's eyes. "This branch was what got me started on the project," Felicella whispered as a family selected books. Mother: "You need a second book." Teen-age daughter: "Yeah, but I don't want to take it out right this second." In traffic somewhere on the Queens border, Felicella became reflective. I didn't do this as a library activist, but if there is a call to action, then it would be to really see buildings as history and information and, in the case of the libraries, an incredible sediment of information. Near the Brownsville branch, she talked about the increase in use of the branches, despite the push for centralization - a fifty-nine-per-cent circulation increase in the past decade, according to a report by the Center for an Urban Future, as well as a forty-per-cent increase in program attendance. "There's all this the talk about this idea of local, and reversing things that are top down," she said, "and the branch libraries are the ur-form of that, and it's why they are what they are. They've been able to be very local, very flexible. It's when you have that really great librarian on the ground, with a good staff, with an excellent custodian, and they take care of things and they keep the connection and they maintain a vitality. Felicella decided to end the tour back in the Village, in the entrance of the Jefferson Market branch, where she pointed out a nineteen-sixties photo of the old Jefferson Courthouse that she had found tucked away in a back office. She explained that partway into her project, she had had a small show, inviting Cervin Robinson, the renowned architectural photographer. He studied Walker Evans, and, in the nineties, Felicella was his assistant. To her surprise, Robinson recognized the old photo. "He said, "That's my photograph," " she recalled. "He said, "I haven't seen that photo for fifty years. It was made for the community group that was fighting to have this building turned into a library." " Photographs by Elizabeth Felicella/Graham Foundation/NYSCA.