
Inside the New York Public Library's Last, Secret Apartments - Tomte
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/inside-the-new-york-public-librarys-last-secret-apartments
======
jacquesm
In the past I would have loved to live in a library, but now I live in a
normal house _and_ it doubles as a library with an almost infinite amount of
reading material, and you, reading this _also_ live in a library! What times
we live in, such luxury. Surely the ancients would have happily done some
murdering for this privilege.

As a kid I'd eat my way through the shelves of the library (it wasn't a very
big one), anything about physics, electronics, space, crafts and so on. There
were days I went twice because I'd finished the books I was allowed to take
out on a subject (sometimes only one).

~~~
GregBuchholz
>I live in a normal house and it doubles as a library with an almost infinite
amount of reading material

Can you flesh this out a little more? I guess maybe it is just an artifact of
my getting older, but I still see quite a qualitative difference between the
information you can find in books, and that which you can find on the web
(text, video, etc.) for subjects which are not computer related. Books seem
like they can give you more in-depth treatment than you get with most internet
based resources. Part of it may be that there is so much more chaff, that
finding the wheat is harder.

~~~
jacquesm
There are more books and articles on the net than you can read in several
lifetimes and most of them are just a google search (allinurl: .pdf) away.

For starters all the scientific papers, all the free books (out of copyright
ones) and of course - to set a bad example - the pirated ones. And then there
are the commercial suppliers, more like bookstores but the effect is much the
same, a kindle is like an infinite bookshelf.

Then there are plenty of sources of information that are not quite books but
that collectively add up to an equivalent and sometimes even more.

Subjects which are not computer related are maybe a little bit harder but not
that much harder, it would be hard to find a subject that interests me (say,
windmills, renewable energy, genetics) that I couldn't fill a reading list
faster than I could consume it, assuming I could consume it all.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:.pdf](https://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:.pdf)

Says there are 1.4 billion results, now I'm sure that you should take that
with a large grain of salt, for instance plenty of those pdfs are not books at
all and there will be duplicates and so on. But if even 1% is unique and
useful content that's 14 million volumes. I'm not aware of any normal library
that I could have access to having that many books.

~~~
GregBuchholz
Can you give us a few of your favorite windmill resources?

~~~
hueving
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/576kmh/so_two_windmi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/576kmh/so_two_windmills_are_standing_in_a_field/)

------
delgaudm
Interestingly, Sharon Washington[1], lived in one of these apartments as a
child and wrote a one-woman play[2] about it. It's set to premiere in a few
weeks.

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0913531/](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0913531/)
[2] [http://www.sharonwashington.com/feeding-the-dragon-
play/](http://www.sharonwashington.com/feeding-the-dragon-play/)

------
lucideer
<OT> Is it just me, or does the comma after "last" seem very, very wrong?

~~~
ashark
Depends on what it's communicating. If there are other, non-secret apartments
then the comma should probably be omitted, yeah. If these are _both_ the last
apartments (without further qualification) _and_ secret, then the comma's
good.

~~~
strictnein
They're not though. No one has lived in these since 2006, but there are
actually others, still in good shape.

[https://www.6sqft.com/life-behind-the-stacks-the-secret-
apar...](https://www.6sqft.com/life-behind-the-stacks-the-secret-apartments-
of-new-york-libraries/)

------
sushid
Reading about this story reminds me of a great Murakami novel, Kafka on the
Shore. There's something slightly eerie yet appealing about being able to
wander around an empty library.

------
gist
What's interesting to me is that in the picture of the Library that opened in
1914 there are stains dripping down the facade from the windows and some other
places. I would think that would take at least several years for something
like that to appear. I wonder if the date is off on that photo.

~~~
jacquesm
Soot in rain on white. A couple of years later and it would likely be almost
black. It's incredible what exposure will do to stonework, especially if the
surface is a little bit rough.

