On Tuesday, the Ridgewood Public Library became a nonagenarian. Now it’s time to party.
The Friends of the Ridgewood Public Library will memorialize the branch’s 90th Anniversary at 6 p.m. Oct. 17.
The event will commemorate the building’s opening on Oct. 15, 1929, with the historical photographs, documents and ephemera, along with a cake and historical presentation by Maryellen Borello.
Friends of the Ridgewood Library and the Queens Memory Project have been working together since June to gather rare images of Ridgewood to add to the library’s digital archives.
“It was really the pushing of the people in the community that [they] needed a library. There had been some traveling stations and storefront libraries, but they kept pushing for an actual building,” said Borello.
Storefront versions of the Ridgewood branch moved three times between 1929 and its first opening in 1912. The building, constructed in 1929, was the first library in New York City to history to be built with city funds instead of philanthropic donations of business magnate Andrew Carnegie.
The city paid reportedly paid $140,000 to purchase the land and erect the brick building. It was expanded in 1936 as a Works Progress Association project, and received various renovations and modifications in the ’60s and ’90s.
