New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

The story

Squeezed between the Metropolitan Opera House and the Vivian Beaumont Theater, this library holds one of the world's largest collections of materials on the performing arts. The idea for a dedicated center began not with a grand civic vision but with a 1932 report by Carleton Sprague Smith, chief of the Music Division, titled "A Worthy Music Center for New York." Before that, the collections were split across two separate buildings. Now a named research center — the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center — it remains both a research library and a branch, an unusual double life in the Lincoln Center complex.