Bobst, the biggest of NYU’s libraries, is hollow in the middle - the empty column up the center of the building is referred to as the atrium, but you may remember it in association with a couple of student suicides we had during the fall semester. People threw themselves over the tenth floor railing - not outside the building, you understand, but inside. After the second time this happened, elaborate preventative measures were taken. In order to get anywhere in the library apart from the first floor or the basement levels, you had to take the elevator to the seventh floor (and only the seventh floor) and then walk the rest of the way up or down as necessary. Overzealous campus security guards would hover around the exits of the stairs and the balconies asking you what you wanted on whatever floor you happened to be on. Of course, they also didn’t know where anything was, but that’s not really the point. The point is that it was an incredible pain in the ass, and a ten minute trip to photocopy, say, an article from a journal too old to be in periodicals and too new to be on JSTOR turned into a forty-five minute excursion through the bowels of Bobst.

Anyway, I hadn’t been inside the library since this semester started until I went in today for yet another article, now that work on my thesis is well underway. The arcane elevator procedures have finally vanished, but in their place there are now gigantic Plexiglass barriers around all the balconies. Whatever architectural effect the designer of the atrium had once hoped to achieve has now been thoroughly mangled by these big shiny plastic walls everywhere, but I suppose I should be grateful that at least we can use the elevators again. And that suicidal NYU students will have to find other buildings from which to jump.