Founded on July 1, 1887, as the result of a bequest by Chicago businessman Walter L. Newberry, the Newberry Library — a world-renowned independent research library offering an extensive non-circulating collection of rare books, maps, music, manuscripts and other printed material spanning six centuries — has a long history. Between 1887 and 1893, the library moved to three different locations in Chicago, IL. But in 1889, it went to its final home when the trustees acquired property on West Walton Place — directly across the street from Washington Square Park, also known as Bughouse Square. Only a few blocks west of the famous Michigan Avenue, the Newberry Library is situated in a beautiful and vibrant neighborhood known as the Gold Coast, which is brimming with a selection of restaurants, shops and nightlife. In an effort to revitalize the building’s beautiful stone architecture and update its layout to be more visitor friendly, a two-year restoration and renovation project was recently completed with the assistance of the design team from Ann Beha Architects (ABA) of Boston, MA.

The Newberry Library was originally designed by notable Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb in the Romanesque Revival style. Its first librarian, William Frederick Poole, was a leading figure in the library world. Under Poole’s leadership, the library purchased 25,000 books in its first year and a half of its existence; by 1894 the year of Poole’s death, it had a collection numbering 120,000 volumes and 44,000 pamphlets. Poole and Cobb disagreed vigorously about the arrangement of the library’s interior spaces. Poole’s vision won out, however, and as a consequence, the new structure contained smaller reading rooms with specific collections in close proximity to library staff possessing relevant expertise, and no central bookstack. Cobb’s vision defined the exterior, which was clad with Stony Creek granite, a pink-colored material quarried in Branford, CT. The addition of a bookstack tower in 1982 eventually provided environmentally secure conditions for the collections and enabled the building to be refitted for staff activities and a broader assortment of public programming, which soon followed.