In this installment of ‘Larger Than Life: Architecture Through the Ages,’ we learn how Boston’s public library was adorned by great artists and sculptors.
In 1854, Boston’s first library was opened in a two-room schoolhouse. Then in 1895, the city opened the McKim Building as its central branch, 16 years before New York City’s public library began welcoming patrons. The library is “a significant point of pride for the City of Boston,” according to a statement by its board of trustees. That pride is not only due to the institution’s long history but to its architectural excellence.
The New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White was chosen by the library’s board to design the structure in 1887. The city named the building for the firm’s founder Charles Follen McKim.
The style and proportions of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, a library constructed in 1850 in France’s capital, served as the main inspiration for the McKim Building. Like many grand American 19th-century and early 20th-century architecture, the McKim Building’s design focuses on the Beaux-Arts style, a blending of classical Roman and Greek styles, and elements of Italian Renaissance architecture. The building’s exterior details and motifs also convey aspects of Boston’s harbor and the proximity to the Atlantic Ocean with decorations of copper dolphins and seashells.
A “palace for the people,” is how Boston-based physician-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. referred to the completed McKim Building. Indeed, striking exterior and interior sculptures, carvings, moldings, bas reliefs, arches, and columns lend an air of royal opulence to this 16,000-square-foot edifice. The Boston Public Library today is an architectural joining of the 19th-century McKim Building and an expansion on Copley Square, completed in 1972.
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Deena Bouknight
Author
A 30-plus-year writer-journalist, Deena C. Bouknight works from her Western North Carolina mountain cottage and has contributed articles on food culture, travel, people, and more to local, regional, national, and international publications. She has written three novels, including the only historical fiction about the East Coast’s worst earthquake. Her website is DeenaBouknightWriting.com