Buffalo Public Library - Table of Contents................. Lafayette Square - Table of Contents
Buffalo Public Library
Buffalo NY
By Chris Andrle
Reprinted from ARTVOICE, August 22, 2002, p. 17
This building preceded the current Buffalo and Erie County Public Library building on Lafayette Square in downtown Buffalo.
Ground breaking for the building occurred in October 1884 after a nationwide design contest, which was won by architect C. L. W. Eidlitz of New York City whose design was unanimously selected over designs submitted by H. H. Richardson and other prominent architects.
Until this time, the Young Men's Association had operated the library, but citing potential confusion with the Young Men's Christian Association, the name was changed to "The Buffalo Library" in 1886. The Buffalo Library was not a free or public library, and patrons had to pay an annual subscription fee to borrow books until 1897 when an act of the State Legislature created the Buffalo Public Library.At this time Buffalo had two major libraries with modern new buildings. The Buffalo Public Library on Lafayette Square was a lending library with a substantial collection and the Grosvenor Library with a new building completed in 1896 at Franklin and Edward Streets was a nationally recognized reference library.
After the completion of the new building early in 1887, library Superintendent Larned said, "No library in all the land is more nobly housed. No library in the entire world is more safely and enduringly placed. So far as human foresight may discover, our books are stored for more centuries than one. If a calamity befalls them, it will need be of some strange and surprising sort. If they multiply beyond their bounds, it will be by some prodigious, unlooked-for increase. We can double their present number, and double it again, without filling by 50,000 books the space even now appropriated to them."
