Morgan Library
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The Pierpont Morgan Library now The Morgan Library & Museum is a museum and research library in New York City. It was founded to house the private library of J. P. Morgan in 1906, which included, besides the manuscripts and printed books, some of them in rare bindings, his collection of prints and drawings. The library was designed by Charles McKim from the firm of McKim, Mead and White and cost $1.2 million. It was made a public institution in 1924 by his son, John Pierpont Morgan, Jr..
Today the library is a complex of buildings which serve as a museum and scholarly research center. It contains many illuminated manuscripts, as well as authors' original manuscripts, including some by Sir Walter Scott, and Honoré de Balzac, as well as the scraps of paper on which Bob Dylan jotted down "Blowin' in the Wind" and "It Ain't Me Babe" . It also contains a large collection of incunabula, prints, and drawings of European artists—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gainsborough, Dürer, and Picasso, early printed Bibles, amongst them, three Gutenberg Bibles, and many examples of fine bookbinding. Other holdings include material from ancient Egypt and medieval liturgical objects, Emile Zola, William Blake's original drawings for his edition of the Book of Job; a Percy Bysshe Shelley notebook; originals of poems by Robert Burns; a Charles Dickens manuscript of A Christmas Carol; a journal by Henry David Thoreau; an extraordinary collection of autographed and annotated libretti and scores from Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mahler and Verdi, and Mozart's Haffner Symphony in D Major; and manuscripts of George Sand, William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord Byron, Charlotte Brontë and nine of Sir Walter Scott's novels, including Ivanhoe.
The first dedicated building to house the library (the McKim Building) was designed by Charles Follen McKim in 1903. It is located on 36th Street which was at the time right to the east of J.P. Morgan's residence, a brownstone house built in 1880 (address: 219 Madison Avenue). In 1907, Pierpont Morgan helped end the Panic of 1907 by rallying fellow bankers to supply liquidity to shore up the endangered banking system. The crisis was resolved in the library after he locked the doors and refused to let the bankers leave until they agreed to a rescue plan.
Morgan's residence was torn down in 1928 to be replaced by an exhibition hall and a reading room, also constructed according to a designed by Charles McKim. The remaining Italianate brownstone house in the library complex is 231 Madison Avenue (on the corner of 37th Street). This house was built by Phelps, Dodge and Company in 1852 and purchased by J. P. Morgan in 1904 and served as the home of his heir J. P. Morgan Jr. from 1905 to 1944. The Morgan Library was closed while it underwent a major expansion project designed by architect Renzo Piano, his debut in New York City. In the interim it sponsored numerous traveling exhibitions around the country. When the work was completed, "The Morgan" reopened, now as the Morgan Library & Museum, 29 April 2006. With the expansion above and below street level, the Morgan's exhibition space had been doubled; Piano set its new reading room under a translucent roof structure, to allow scholars to examine manuscripts in natural light. Piano's four-story steel-and-glass atrium links McKim's library building and the Morgan house in a new ensemble. Added storage facilities were obtained by drilling into Manhattan's bedrock schist.
E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime featured a dramatic denouement in the newly-opened Morgan Library.
The library's first director was Belle da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, who served from the Library's inception until her retirement in 1948. Her successor, Frederick Baldwin Adams, Jr., managed the Library until 1969 and was also world-renowned for his own personal collections.
[edit] Location
The Library is located in mid-town Manhattan at the edge of Murray Hill, its street address is: 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.
