A locked door and myriad treasures beyond, in vast rooms deemed unusable at Boston Public Library – The Boston Globe

 The Boston Globe

A locked door and myriad treasures beyond, in vast rooms deemed unusable at Boston Public Library

By Malcolm Gay, The Boston Globe updated on October 3, 2025, 7 minutes to read

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The resplendence of the Boston Public Library’s McKim Building unfolds with each step up the grand staircase.

Past the imposing stone lions, the golden-hued stairwell gives way to an airy gallery of murals, a millennium-spanning celebration of the muses. Nearby, a narrower stairway leads to the hushed third floor, where people wander the opulent gallery to untangle John Singer Sargent’s “Triumph of Religion,” a monumental cycle of murals the artist left unfinished despite nearly three decades of work.

Inevitably, some will try the leather-clad door at the end of the gallery, whichseems to promise yet more wonders beyond.

But the door is locked.

It has been closed to the public for more than a decade, concealing a once-grand enfilade of vaulted ceilings, interior arcades, and elevated walkways that wrap around the library’s courtyard.

The rooms, which rival many of the building’s most celebrated spaces, now warehouse a Narnia-worthy collection of the library’s holdings — everything from sculptures of Joan of Arc and a portrait of Samuel Johnson, to a room of illuminated dioramas, where a pair of miniature boxers stand frozen in mid-fight, as though before a roaring crowd.

There are neoclassical sculptures that peek from beneath plastic, a weathervane in the shape of a cod, a printing press that belonged to artist Hyman Bloom, and a set of golf clubs once swung by author Cleveland Amory. And that’s to say nothing of the myriad architectural plans, microfiche, administrative records, card catalogues, and archives piled about in boxes and in crates.

At 130 years old, the McKim Building is nearly as iconic as the collection it houses. Designed by architect Charles Follen McKim,it is a sort of secular cathedral, exalting the life of the mind.

But today, nearly 40 percent of the building — essentially the entire third floor — lies dilapidated and inaccessible to the public. Paint peels from its walls and ceilings. Crumbling plaster has exposed masonry. Leaky pipes have prompted library officials to turn off the heat, meaning most of the palatial third-floor rooms have no climate control at all, a wrecking ball of temperature swings and humidity.

Now at a crisis point, the unusable spaces and their at-riskcontents have prompted library officials to begin imagining a massive — and massively expensive — overhaul, one that would not only restore the third floor but also reshape one of the country’s oldest and most vaunted library buildings.

BPL president David Leonard said any renovation must not merely safeguard the building, but also secure the library’s collections, making them (and the physical building) more accessible to the public.

“We have an obligation to our collections and to the building itself, which we like to think of as part of the collection,” Leonard said while touring the McKim.

The library recently received a $5.5 million gift from an anonymous donor to study the building and its systems. It’s a preliminary step to understand what obstacles and opportunities the building may present as a renovation project that seeks to update the 19th century structure to meet the demands of 21st century library patrons.

Once the five-year planning phase is completed, leaders hope to enter the project’s design phase.

Beth Prindle, BPL’s director of research and special collections, called the renovation effort “a once in a multiple-generation opportunity.”

“The McKim transformation and rebirth is a clarion call,” she said. “We collected this incredible, irreplaceable collection, and we need [the public] to help us steward it, not only for [today], but for future generations.”

In addition to branch renovations, BPL has completed two major capital projects on its central library over the past decade. In 2016, the library unveiled a $78 million renovation to its lending library in the 1970s-era Boylston Street Building. That was followed in 2022 by a $16 million project that carved out a state-of-the-art facility to house its vast special collections of rare books and other historic items.

The cost of renovating the McKim, however, would likely dwarf those earlier projects. A 2021 master plan estimated construction costs at $325 million, but the final project could cost significantly more.

Leonard, who compared the project’s potential cost to building a new public high school,said the library will have a better price estimate in a year or so, but “regardless, it’s a large, triple, hundreds of millions of dollars.”

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