BROOKLYN BUSINESS LIBRARY, 1962-2014

ACCORDING to the NY Public Library website, the Brooklyn Business Library “has a reference collection of more than 100,000 volumes, a circulating collection of 30,000 books, internet access, electronic resources, 800 magazines and newspapers, and real estate data. The Business Library provides industry and demographic data, investment information, business directories and free electronic resources available remotely with library card, as well as access to the internet computers. It also houses the Small Business Information Center, which includes sample business plans, books on starting and advancing a business, and free counseling with SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives.” Amazingly, though, in the summer of 2014 its hours, and that of the Brooklyn Heights Branch, were from 8AM to 1PM Monday to Friday, just 5 hours a day, and there was no air conditioning.

The Brooklyn Public Library thereupon sold the building at 280 Cadman Plaza West, where it meets Clinton and Tillary Streets, to a development firm, which over the next decade razed it and constructed a tall, narrow condo building, One Clinton, which when finished is supposed to contain a library on the ground floor. In the meantime, the Business Library was relocated to the central branch at Grand Army Plaza, over a mile from this location.

This was the site of my first part-time job of any length. In the summer of 1978 I answered an ad in the job placement department at St. Francis College and got a gig here. My tasks here consisted of shelving books and magazines, labeling with magic marker on book spines (I’m a pretty good hand printer) filing microfiche (books and magazine content was stored in reduced size on flat sheets of glassine that was accessed through a magnifying viewer). Our schedules were posted weekly and I had various hours depending on when my classes at St. Francis College were. I could work a few hours early in the morning and then return for an evening shift, sometimes the same day; the library was open from 8AM to 10PM some days.

During a transit strike in April 1980, it was no problem for me as I rode there from Bay Ridge on my bicycle all that week. However, I almost drowned one of those days when we had three inches of rain.

The head librarian was the improbably-named Sylvia Mechanic, who didn’t directly hire me. Sylvia despised me; in the age of disco, when people were wearing suits again, I was a punk kid. (I have run into trouble in this situation over the years, with people who didn’t hire me but were saddled with me anyway, especially at Macy’s beginning in 2000.) I got along with my coworkers who were mostly high school kids. I had a crush on one, named Patti H., but she was too young for me. I came close to getting into a fist fight with another who was a bully. We wound up getting along eventually. At the time, he left a note on my locker that said “You’re spent.” I have never heard the word used as an insult, before or since.

While working at BBL, one of their reference volumes was a battered 4-volume 1929 desk atlas of Brooklyn by Belcher-Hyde. Even after I left BBL, I would sometimes come in and ask to see it. My collector friend Brian Merlis had a more pristine copy, but I was happy to see it online a few years ago at Historic Map Works. Thus, the Business Library directly influenced my future activities as an urban chronicler.

I remained there till February 1981, when I got a job with a textbook publisher in Manhattan. When that didn’t last I wound up at the city’s biggest type shop, Photo-Lettering.

For a time, I still checked into the BBL to see how many telephone books with my hand printing on the spine were still there and to pore over that crumbling desk atlas.

Like most places I’ve worked in, it’s gone now.

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7/14/2024