Starting from the bottom – construction of Butler’s basement, spring 1932

Yesterday, the famous New York Public Library Rose Room re-opened after two long years of repairs and $12 million dollars, required to repair the damage caused when a 16-inch plaster rosette crashed down from the room’s ceiling. This beautiful reading room was the architectural inspiration for another reading room that looms much larger on our campus: Butler 209. Senior Staffer Betsy Ladyzhets takes this timely opportunity to explore the somewhat thorny history behind Butler.

The inception of Butler took place in August of 1927, when Charles Williamson, the director of Low Library, wrote to President Nicholas Murray Butler that Low just wasn’t working out any more. Its public spaces were cramped, there were too many books in the Rotunda for anybody to actually have space to look at them – basically, Columbia’s books needed what all high-school sweethearts tell their significant others they need over Thanksgiving break: space.

The stacks coming to life – November 10, 1932

Williamson’s proposed solution was to complete the then-under-construction University Hall (now buried in the foundations of the Business School) and merge it with Low Library. But James Rogers, the architect President Butler hired to construct a new library, had other ideas. University Hall, while more spacious than Low, still didn’t have enough room for all of Columbia’s books – plus, the already-existing parts of University Hall included a gymnasium and a swimming pool, which would make building stacks a major engineering challenge. The eventual solution that Rogers and Williamson found was to build on South Field, the stretch of land next to 114th Street that now constitutes Lower Campus.

Still, Butler (or, as it was then called, South Hall) had a long way to go before it could open its doors. Rogers’ proposed designs received criticism from all corners: the main donor refused to fund the building unless its cost was significantly reduced, Williamson wanted room for more books, and other architects thought the building was too antiquated for the modern era. One student at Yale published an article calling a library Rogers had designed for that campus a “monument of lifelessness and decadence.” But Rogers and Williamson persisted, until they eventually finalized a design that incorporated both Rogers’ neoclassical aesthetics and Williamson’s desire for a workable library that would be able to expand with the university’s growing collection. 209, the main reading room inspired by the NYPL Rose Room, was one of the design’s highlights.

Complete and ready for student suffering – summer 1934

When South Hall opened in 1934, it was an impressive feat of modern technology for the time: it boasted pneumatic tubes, conveyor belts, air-conditioned stacks, and non-glare lighting. Many of these features are now obsolete, but the reading rooms remain as beautiful as they were in the 1930s – even though 209 now gets flack for being the “most imperialist” room on campus. But whether or not you’re a fan of 209, the newly remastered Rose Room is worth a trip down to 42nd Street. And who knows, maybe you’ll even be able to snag a good study spot there.

Early Butler via CU Library Archives