Nightclub for Nerds

Just after 10 p.m., Leila Taylor, the creative director of the Brooklyn Public Library, stepped onto a platform in the Central Library at 10 Grand Army Plaza and read a quote from the eccentric paper architect Étienne-Louis Boullée. In Architecture, Essay on Art, unpublished until 1953, Boullée writes: “If there’s one project that should please an Architect, and at the same time, fire his genius, it is a Public Library.” Hushed cheers and soft claps filled the huge wing devoted to Languages & Literature. I’d gotten to the talk early, so when I turned around I was astonished to see roughly two hundred people leaning on bookshelves and sitting on the floor behind me. Some were taking notes; others ate muffins or drank from straws stabbed into big green coconuts.

The eighth annual Night in the Library—which was a tick cooler back when it was co-sponsored by the French Embassy—ran from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m., free and open to the public. (The French programming would go for twelve hours, and the speakers were better.) Lecture topics ranged from Palestinian liberation to the ethics of AI; a Marxist theater troupe from Vermont performed twice. I wanted to stay to hear Taylor’s former teacher, the New School philosopher Simon Critchley, argue that music is a form of mysticism, but I had to head over to the Information Commons. The designer Jenny Cooper was about to close up her garment-mending station for the night, and I needed to retrieve my torn coat.

With a hand in my newly restored pocket, I made for the escalator to meet my girlfriend on the second floor. I almost missed the volunteers collecting signatures for a petition opposing Mayor Eric Adams’s proposed $58.3 million cut to library funding. I knew Adams’s incompetent accounting meant all city agencies would likely have to trim 5 percent of their budgets, but the order felt that much more arbitrary and depraved here in the vibrating lobby of Alfred Morton Githens and Francis Keally’s art deco palace. Later I read that municipal austerity politics had delayed construction of the building—initially conceived in the Beaux-Arts style by architect Raymond F. Almirall—for decades. Belt-tightening brought on by war and economic depression all but extinguished the fire of Almirall’s genius: He died two years before the library opened in 1941, its streamline moderne limestone façade concealing the rudiments of his design. A public library is not a luxury—even when it hosts a nightclub for nerds.

I signed, then went upstairs where we caught the end of a talk on the politics of adoption. It was standing room only.