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Someone has written on a wall inside the Gould Memorial Library at the City University of New York's Bronx Community College. Amid piles of plaster and broken glass, behind bits of ratty old newspaper, appears the phrase: "Nixon summer of 70."
It was around that time that antiwar protesters chucked Molotov cocktails into the auditorium on the lower level of the building, the centerpiece of what was then New York University's undergraduate campus. The resulting fire destroyed a Tiffany window at one end of the auditorium, and the heat shattered the thick glass sections set into the floor of the main rotunda above.
The building has fallen on even harder times since. Designed in the early 1890s by Stanford White, of McKim, Mead & White, the library was one of the most impressive ever built on an American campus. The Pantheon-like rotunda was topped by a spectacular coffered dome gilded with Dutch metal and brightened by a skylight at its center. A glass-floored balcony circled the dome, as did 13 balconets, each equipped with rotating bookshelves that also functioned as revolving doors. Light from glass panels in the roof spilled into the stacks surrounding the rotunda, and light from the dome's skylight found its way down through the glass in the rotunda floor to illuminate the auditorium.
But by the time NYU turned the campus over to the City University of New York system in 1973, the skylight...