I   Michael Stoller
 

often been remembered. Unfortunately, the
evidence suggests the President had no such
vision, indeed that the conversation never
took place as described. Instead, the rise of the
library that would eventually bear Nicholas
Murray Butler's name—from the choice of a
site to the building's design and construction
—was a far more complex enterprise and far
less the product of President Butler's mind
than he recalled during his last years.

Surely Butler did already know in 1926
that Cohunbia needed a new library. But the
story of its evoludon actually appears to
have started in August 1927, when Charles
Williamson, the recently appointed director of
(k)lumbia's library, addressed a thirteen-page
letter to President Butler: "During the past
year," Williamson wrote, "I have given consid¬
erable thought to the problem of providing an
adequate central building for the University
library. The need for a modern building grows
more acute each year. Already a condition has
been reached which threatens to hamper the
growth and development of the University..."-

The pantheon that Charles McKim had
built thirty years earlier in tribute to Seth
Low's father had always been a better monu¬
ment than a library. Williamson, in his letter to
Butler, ticked off Low Library's sins: the public
service spaces, lofty though they might be,
were cramped; the reference collection had all
but taken over the rotunda, crowding out the
readers; there was no place to accommodate
the growing card catalogs;  above  all,  Low
 

lacked adequate shelf space. "Any building
erected now," Williamson told Butler, "should
provide for the growth of forty years at least,
which would therefore mean shelving for not
less than 4,000,000 volumes. Moreover, in any
building plan adopted now some thought
should be given to the sdll more distant future."^

Williamson's proposed solution didn't
entail the construction of a new building but
only the completion of McKim's never-finished
University Hall. Located just north of Low
Library, it was a building in which the campus'
original architect had planned to house a
theatre, a student dining hall, and the
University's administrative offices. Only the
lower stories had been completed in perma¬
nent form, housing the old gymnasium and
swimming pool—facilities that remain today,
buried in the foimdations of the Business
School, their curved, north facade largely
concealed by the new Schapiro. But in 1927
the completion of University Hall seemed the
next step in the fulfillment of McKim's master
plan for the campus, and Williamson's pro¬
posal for a University Hail library envisioned a
building whose scale exceeded anything even
McKim had imagined for Columbia.

Williamson's proposal actually involved
not only the compledon of University Hall but
its physical merger with Low Library, and the
fact that the latter building was to serve as an
enormous vestibule to the new facility gives
some sense of the scale of the librarian's
vision. A researcher would climb the steps of