YONKERS HISTORY: The Yonkers Public Library system started over 100 years ago with the assistance of Andrew Carnegie?
The Yonkers Public Library was chartered by the state of New York on February 9, 1893. Having been formed in 1883 by the consolidation of five public school libraries, the Library called various sites home between the years 1883 and 1904.
Yonkers Mayor Leslie Sutherland, joined by writer John Kendrick Bangs and educator Charles E. Gorton, formed a committee in 1900 to request funds from Andrew Carnegie for the construction of a permanent library building. 17,000 volumes of books were kept in the Nisbet House in Washington Park until the building was completed.
Carnegie responded in March 1901, with a donation of $50,000, asking only that the City of Yonkers provide a suitable site for the library building and that it agree to expend $5,000 annually on the building's maintenance.
Several sites for the new library were proposed by members of the Yonkers Board of Aldermen, including the site in the southwest corner of Washington Park that was eventually selected.
Designed by local architects Edwin A. Quick & Son, and constructed by the local firm of Lynch and Larkin, Mr. Carnegie's library building opened to the public on the corner of South Broadway and Nepperhan Terrace on July 9, 1904.
Support for this newly built library came from Ervin Saunders. Saunders, an executive of a machinery manufacture at Saunders & Sons, Incorporated, bequeathed $50,000 to the Yonkers Public Library before his death in 1909.
There was a stipulation that all of the money had to be spent on the purchasing of nonfiction books.
With the opening, in the 1920s, of two branch libraries -- one in the Armour Villa Park neighborhood (later dissolved for the Will Library) and the other in the Crestwood neighborhood -- the Carnegie library became the main branch of the Yonkers Public Library.
Many argued that Yonkers Carnegie Library was the most beautiful building in the city.
Most say that the library was destroyed to widen a road
However, rumors suggest the library was killed due to political corruption, greed, and incompetence.
Still other conspiracies suggest that the library was destroyed as a result of racism.....
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