The History Behind Bobst Library Will Further Dissuade You From Ever Doing Work There
By Dana Daniels
If there were a tenth circle of hell, it’d be Bobst.
Okay, not really, but for the NYU community, Bobst is a symbol of dread and frustration, as well as a 12-story reminder of the never-ending stress of higher education. But at the risk of sounding like a tinfoil hat-wearing, ghost hunting, crystal healing enthusiast with a voodoo doll collection, perhaps Bobst’s bad vibes are inevitable — do I smell a curse? — given the history of its founding.
Our library’s namesake — the self-made pharmaceutical tycoon Elmer Holmes Bobst — turns out to have been so lacking in moral character that he’d give Anthony Weiner a run for his money. Yes, yes, he did become incredibly successful despite his humble beginnings and received no formal education — he taught himself the ways of pharmacology and never received one of them fancy college degrees — but, was a documented anti-semite, an alleged perpetrator of both incest and pedophilia, and really just a guy you wouldn’t want to invite to Thanksgiving dinner.
Bobst, a close friend of Richard Nixon (really, this should have been a red flag to everyone) wrote about his distaste for Jews in a letter to the disgraced president, saying:
The Jews have troubled the world from the very beginning.
As well as:
The Jews are tolerated but, as a whole, are not liked by other American nationalities.
As we’ve previously reported, Bobst’s family life was similarly shitty. After his death, both his granddaughter and great-granddaughter filed suits alleging pedophiliac sexual assault at the hands of Bobst, both of which were denied. Furthermore, his wife, Mamdouha — the Lucille Bluth doppleganger whose portrait’s eyes seem to follow you from its position in the library’s portrait gallery — was a Lebanese diplomat who fervently supported the idea that women worldwide should stay at home and tend to their husbands…which seems a bit ironic, given that NYU is one of the country’s most liberal universities.
But wait! There’s more!
Not only did our library’s namesake have some issues, but its lead architect, Harvard alumnus Philip Johnson, was an open Nazi sympathizer and fascist activist during the Hitler’s reign of terror. In fact, his political leanings were so well known that he was accused by the Office of Naval Intelligence of being a spy. However, later in life, he admitted that his aforementioned political beliefs were a result of “unbelievable stupidity” that can be summed up in his hilariously understated remarks on the matter:
My worst mistake was going to Germany and liking Hitler too much.
Given that Washington Square Park — the locus of NYU’s campus — is built atop a sturdy foundation of 20,000, 200-year-old corpses, this all seems enough to persuade not just the superstitious — even people who are only a little-stitious — that the Curse O’ Bobst does, in fact exist; the daunting interior of our library seems to support that your heebie-jeebies aren’t unfounded.
But the last nail in the coffin? The pattern of Bobst’s atrium’s hypnotizing marble flooring. As explored in depth in the documentary The NYU Suicides, Johnson intended for the floor to be an optical illusion…for suicide-deterring purposes:
…it was purposely designed to reduce suicide jumpers. If you look at the tops of the metal gates on each floor, they are designed to look like crosses while the floor was designed to look like spikes that are far away. It was, of course, inspired by MC Escher’s drawing “Depth.”
This is particularly haunting given the string of on-campus suicides within the last decade that began with a student’s dive from Bobst’s 10th floor.
My conclusion? If you’re meant to head off to the library, but you really don’t wanna go, perhaps your unwillingness is based on more than just your laziness.
