Steve Schwarzman’s Library Investment Is a Pandemic Winner

(Bloomberg) -- Of the many ways to track New York’s comeback, there’s one that just might take the pulse of wealthy New Yorkers best of all: how much a gala raises in an evening. 

For the past couple of months, several charities have met their marks.

On Monday night, the New York Public Library blew its record out of the sparkling water, by double.

The event raised $5.8 million, Tony Marx, the library’s president, told guests in the Rose reading room seated at long tables with the patina of intellectual inquiry covered by antique-white cloths, bouquets of ranunculus, and bundles of blackberries and persimmon.

Many people made that happen, of course. But on stage, Marx, then Governor Kathy Hochul, then Senator Charles Schumer acknowledged two people in particular: Steve and Christine Schwarzman, the gala’s executive co-chairs. 

In the applause was some relief that a big donor such as Steve Schwarzman -- who made quite the splash in 2008 with a $100 million gift that put his name on the library’s historic research building -- was still committed. Still giving. Still devoted to a central piece of New York civic and physical infrastructure. 

While he may have blended into the few hundred guests dining on short rib in the Reading Room, he stood out during the cocktail hour, standing in the center of Astor Hall as the orchestra played. 

It was in this spot that Schwarzman expressed confidence in the election of Democrat Eric Adams.

“He’s out meeting everyone, he knows what New York needs,” Schwarzman said. “He’s going to be a terrific mayor for all the people.” 

The evening carried a feeling that New York and the library are going to be OK, even as it marked the death in April of one of its most ardent champions. Vartan Gregorian restored grandeur to the library in the 1980s. 

It helped that library staff and trustees proudly shared details of how the library has helped New Yorkers through the pandemic. Students used its Wifi to learn. Readers took out 10 million e-books. The Schwarzman Building and many of the branch libraries are being renovated, and the library’s largest circulating branch, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, officially opened this year, said Iris Weinshall, the library’s chief operating officer, who is married to Senator Schumer.  

Another reason for the good mood was just how nice it was to be inside the library, around books and other treasures -- cuneiforms, an Andy Warhol painting of a Studio 54 ticket.

“I feel wrapped in the nurturing of erudition,” Tina Brown said, citing conversations she’d had with David Remnick and Henry Louis Gates. The book publishing world was out in full force, too.

Millennium’s Robert Jain met novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who with Brown, Jonathan Lethem and Darren Walker were honored as Library Lions. Investment manager Boaz Weinstein said hello to novelist Gary Shteyngart -- they were classmates at Stuyvesant High School. 

“I went to the library all the time,” Shteyngart said of his New York City boyhood. “My father would take me to the Queens Public Library in Jamaica. I remember there was a Russian book section. I would read a lot of Chekhov. And one day, my father, when I was 11 years old, he went to the parent-teacher conference, and the teacher said, ‘We hear Gary reads Tolstoy in the original,’ and my father said, ‘Tsk. Only Chekhov.’” 

And now he was back, an acclaimed author, sipping a gin and vodka martini.

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