The New York Public Library was founded in 1895. The library is the outcome of the merging of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox, and the Samuel Jones Tilden Trust. 
The library’s historic Fifth Avenue/42nd Street premises (opened in 1911) immediately became the city’s prime ‘port of call’, as a seat of learning and as a focus of cultural life. The library now hosts the collections of its four research centres (the Humanities and Social Science Library; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Science, Industry and Business Library). 
With its 87 branches, the NYPL currently provides public access to more than 50 million publications, with 16 million visitors per year and 25 million Internet catalog-search users (www.nypl.org). In March 2008, the Foster + Partners architects’ office received the commission for the new main library building project.