The “New” Boston Public Library!

An old friend and I made plans to meet outside the Boston Public Library this morning on Boylston Street. It was steaming hot and humid, but we both wanted to experience the library for the first time together.

Not the first time visiting the Johnson Building, of course. I’d been going there since the place opened in 1972, when my initial reaction was, “Is this some kind of sick, twisted joke?” The building had been designed by Philip Johnson as a brutal, joyless, frowning, forbidding maximum security penal facility; it had a small handful of low-browed windows, siege-proof granite walls, and a central well letting in just enough natural light to make you feel like you were far, far underground (an impression only strengthened by the vast numbers of muttering, scabrous street people who almost instantly colonized every interior and exterior space of the whole building). At the center of that grudging well of light was a central Information Desk that tended to be staffed by goggle-eyed sweaty-browed angry loners when it was staffed at all. The bathrooms, located in a dank, dripping sub-basement, seldom had toilet paper or running water, but the deep shadows thrown by their faulty ceiling lights were excellent places to score heroin or rent boys, or rent boys on heroin. The contrast with the gorgeous McKim building next door could hardly have been greater.

The McKim building – the place I and a good many other Bostonians are thinking about when we say “the library” – was a palace, not a prison. Its jewel, Bates Hall, had soaring windows, and its courtyard was a little oasis of pure, beautiful relaxation, and it had the nation’s very first children’s room, which was the talk of Boston’s parents for years as a fine place to bring (and perhaps, in a less worried age, leave for a while) their kids. Countless are the hours I spent in the studious serenity of Bates Hall, and countless are the times I retreated there after some bookish errand or other forced me to endure the modernist monstrosities of the Johnson Building next door. For me, the McKim Building was the “real” library, and the great grey granite carbuncle next door was one of those expensive evil concessions to modernity that nobody ever actually likes. By the time major renovations on it began in 2013, I hadn’t visited in years.

But when I saw the news headline that those renovations were now complete – there’d been a ribbon-cutting and everything – I latched onto the company of a fellow bookworm and went to see what all those millions of dollars had bought.

The first difference is obvious long before you go inside: the sidewalk along the entire front of the Johnson Building is now dotted with trees instead of massive plinths of granite that once walled it off from view. The effect is unexpectedly dramatic: you feel like you’re passing a building that wants you to enter, as opposed to one that wants you to go away.

So we ventured inside! The first impression inside the front doors was mildly discordant: the sound of bit-drills. Turns out the ribbon was cut a bit prematurely, as all ribbons tend to be: work is still being done to finish the first-floor cafe.

But that discord almost instantly fades to wonder – the entire Boylston Street first floor of the place is now a vast open space, flooded with natural light from huge, nearly-continuous ground-floor windows, and right in front of you as you walk in is the newly-positioned central Information Desk, redesigned as a “Welcome Center” and outlined in bright panels.

The change from the old massif-bunker atmosphere is simply astonishing – whatever the final tally on the price of this renovation, it was money well-spent.

The New Releases shelves are right there as you walk in, not just handy but also conveniently laid out, very much as books you might end up loving rather than product the library staff resents moving around all day long. There are help desks and BPL staff at hand everywhere – none of the furtive searching through shadows that typified needing help in the bad old days. There are more bathrooms, and they’ve been redesigned for greater wheelchair accessibility. There are water fountains and power outlets scattered all over.

As we moved around the first floor and then went up to the mezzanine and second floor, one of the much-touted features of the redesign became overwhelmingly apparent: the BPL now has a lot of public-access computers. And the more I thought about it, the more this struck me as the heart of the wisdom behind this renovation. When the old McKim building opened in 1895, it proudly welcomed its visitors with the motto that’s still above its front door: “Free To All.” What was meant at the time was of course books but also more than that: all that free access to books (and the quiet in which to read and use them) could mean to the Bostonians who walked through its doors – the freedom and the power that come from access to a world-class library.

In the 21^st century, as painful as it might be for a die-hard bookworm such as myself to admit, that freedom and that power no longer come from bound-and-printed paper books. They come from the Internet. The fact that anybody can walk into the new Johnson Building, sit down at any of the 85 terminals, and browse or work online is the exact cultural descendant of that earlier “Free To All.” Where I might once have expected the purist in me to be scowling at the sight of so many computers taking up space that might have gone to more editions of Plutarch, instead the sight made me smile.

Of course, there are still plenty of books, as we saw when we worked our way into the various subject-sections. Only ‘work’ isn’t quite the word, as it certainly was in the dark old pre-redesign days. Back then, there were no labeled subject-sections; instead, there were rows upon rows of tall light-blocking metal stacks differentiated by multiple-digit call numbers and crammed with books that hadn’t been checked out by anybody in twenty years. These rows were narrow, suffocating spaces, tiny corridors that seemed intent on crushing any of the sense of wonder their contents were designed to inspire. The unspoken message was loud and clear: Hurry up and find your book, and then GO.

Again, the “new” Johnson Building setup couldn’t be more different. With so many lower bookcases and so much natural light, the old canyon-effect has been effectively eliminated, and the subject-sections are designated not by a 13-digit call number you had to scribble down or memorize but rather by bright red banners hanging from the ceiling, and by bright red globes shouting the types of books in that area. It’s a trite kind of word to use, but it’s true nonetheless: the whole arrangement was immensely inviting.

By the time we were done touring the place, we were each surprised to realize that we’d easily spent an hour, talking about books the whole time. An hour is a pittance amidst the glories of the McKim Building, but not very long ago, the prospect of spending an hour in the Johnson Building would have been depressing, very nearly alarming. Not so now; we could easily, happily have stayed longer.

Against every one of my expectations, I walked out not only happy but proud: the new renovations to the Johnson Building are so thoughtful, so well-executed, and so successful that it actually feels like Boston has been given an entirely new library. My friend and I aren’t easy patrons to please, and yet we were utterly delighted. So now I have not one but two “real” BPLs – which will be a bit disorienting for a while, but it’s a problem I like having.