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Inside One Of The NYPL's Secret Abandoned Apartments

Jen Carlson

Published Oct 28, 2016

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Jen Carlson

Published Oct 28, 2016

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There was a time when you could live in New York City and get paid for it. The New York Public Library system has 30 Carnegie libraries (funded by Andrew Carnegie) located in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, and they were all built with custodial apartments around the turn of the 20th century. There were also two non-Carnegie branches (George Bruce Library and Ottendorfer Library) which had similar apartments. In 1949, an advertisement for a custodial job at one of the branches listed a monthly salary of $60.83, and with that salary came a five-room apartment (ft. a dumbwaiter!) in the building.

The catch? You had to be on the job 24/7. A rep for the NYPL explained, "The apartments came with the job, so as long as someone was doing the job, the apartment was theirs. Taking care of buildings used to be a 24-hour job, especially in the age of coal furnaces."

Of the 32 apartments, all but 13 have already been renovated into usable spaces, or are currently being renovated. The rest sit in abandonment until the budget allows for the work to be done. We recently got invited to the one inside of the Hunts Point Library in the Bronx, which has been uninhabited since the tenants moved out in 2001.

(Photo by Tod Seelie/Gothamist)

Located on the second and third floors of the building, which was completed in 1929, the library's custodian lived there with his family for decades, moving out in 2001. The library's information assistant, Reina Velazquez, recalls how the apartment caught the eye of patrons, "who would be curious after seeing family members enter the side door with groceries."

Liana Acevedo, the library's current manager who was also working there when the family was in residence, told us of how "the cat the family had would escape the apartment and join the patrons roaming around the branch. He would enjoy mingling until he was found and taken back upstairs." She recalled the custodian's younger son "would sneak downstairs after hours and read books, we would know because he would leave them on the end of the shelf so that he didn't put them in the wrong place."

He wasn't the only kid roaming a library after hours—Sharon Washington (who has a recurring role of Judge Hayes on Law & Order: SVU) wrote and performed in a one-woman show in Pittsburgh called "Feeding the Dragon," which tells her story of living in one of NYC's libraries. Washington lived with her family in a custodial apartment in the St. Agnes branch of the NYPL, located at 81st and Amsterdam, from the ages of 5 to 12.

"We all had keys to the front door, and inside, there was a separate entrance," she told the Pittsburgh Gazette. "I would have friends come over and have a party in the library. Everybody could sort of run around, and then my father would have to be very careful about cleaning up."

Of course, the most intriguing apartments were at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 5th Avenue. We're told, "John Fedeler, the first superintendent of the Library, lived in an eight-room apartment on the mezzanine floor from 1911 to 1941, raising two children there. His daughter was born in the building." Want to know how he kept the kids from roaming around and making mischief? According to the NY Times, he developed a little urban legend.

"More real and frightening was the bag man in the library. He was a porter who went about, after lights out picking up scrap paper and discareded newspapers and magazines. Father always told the children that the bag man was a cannibal and that he would just as soon pop little John, or Edouard, or Viviani Joffre into the bag if he found them roaming the halls."

One of his sons, John H. E. Fedeler, later took over the superintendent position, and the family moved out of the apartment in the late '40s as the space was needed for something else. (Sadly, the NYPL couldn't locate any photos of the old apartment.)

Hunts Point Library. (Photo courtesy of the NYPL)

The custodial program ended for many reasons, an NYPL rep tells us: "The end of coal furnaces (and by extension the need to feed those furnaces 24-7) was the biggest. But also the advent of better transportation (making it easy for one custodian to manage several buildings, for example) made that model inefficient."

The apartments that have already been renovated into a usable space—including the 5 are already funded and slated for renovation—have been done so through that $100 million allocation from the city to NYPL in the 10-year capital plan. ("Historic," a rep for the NYPL told Gothamist, because it "was the first time in recent history the city added libraries to the 10-year capital plan.")

It's unclear what the Hunts Point Library will become, but it will need a "top-to-bottom renovation" to be transformed into a usable space.

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new york public library

Jen Carlson

Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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