Hamilton Grange Library

The story

A Carnegie-funded library designed to look like a Florentine palazzo sits on a Harlem street corner, its rusticated stone facade and bronze lamps still intact after more than a century. McKim, Mead & White drew it in Italian Renaissance style — one of eleven branches the firm designed among the sixty-five Carnegie libraries built across New York. It opened January 8, 1907, named for Alexander Hamilton's nearby country home. The Landmarks Preservation Commission later called it a model of how that grand architectural vocabulary could be scaled down, without losing its dignity, for a small public building.