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Back to the Future Restoration of the Rovensky Delivery Room
Figure 1. Redwood Rovensky Delivery Room, 2021.
by Benedict Leca, Ph.D.
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We have a tendency to speculate about what historic structures might have actually “been like” originally, especially their interior spaces, which are far more likely to have sustained alterations than exterior architecture. On one hand, this helps us to locate in time aspects of what we’re experiencing during a visit, and to reimagine the past with greater accuracy. On the other hand, it speaks to false notions of purity and stasis—because buildings, particularly those of long vintage as the Redwood, are living things, emergent and adaptable to the needs of their users. The main structure of the Redwood narrates this very process: a series of extensions added along the west-to-east axis over 275 years.
There are of course fixed points in a building’s evolution that allow for informed, historically sound restorations. Such is the subject here: the Historical Preservation & Heritage Commissionapproved restoration of the Rovensky Delivery Room, the interior of the extension designed by George Champlin Mason in 1875 and endowed in 2006 by the Grace family in honor of the family patriarch, the industrialist John E. Rovensky (1880-1970). Visitors will now notice the radical before/after difference (Fig. 1). Gone are the shelved walls implanted in 1914 by the architect Norman Isham that projected into the main space from near each corner and which partitioned the room, one specifically designed by Champlin Mason as an open-spaced art gallery, the first in Rhode Island.
The story begins earlier, with another Newporter who had a distinguished career and long involvement with the Redwood: the portrait painter Charles Bird King (1785-1862). For it was in late 1861 that Bird King’s precarious health had forced him to execute his will preemptively and to transfer some “fifty or more [pictures]” from his Washington D.C. studio to the Redwood. Even if the Library had likely from early on been the recipient of art works, notably portraits in the eighteenth century, it is the absorption of Bird King’s collection that set in motion the need for a new wing specifically conceived as an art gallery. Here is the June 1865 affirmation of the ‘Committee on the Enlargement of the Library,’ which established the bedrock purpose and subsequent design of the 1875 addition: “The valuable collection of pictures already in the possession of the Library, and the equally valuable collection of statuary proposed to be donated to the Library by Edward King, Esq., indicate the necessity for a suitable hall, to be used as a gallery for works of art.”
Thus a decade later, in 1875, and after some deliberations about
Figure 2. Richard Bliss, Manuscript floor plan of Redwood Library, 1911.
which architect should win the commission, Champlin Mason was assigned to lead the erection of the new gallery. While none of the drawings survive, we fortunately have Redwood librarian Richard Bliss’s 1911 floorplan of the Library—drawn up three years before Isham’s alterations in 1914—to validate what we have now returned to (Fig. 2). There we see the Rovensky Delivery Room as a large, open, mixed-use space, labeled “Art Gallery” and also as the Library’s Delivery Room. At the time among the largest enclosed spaces in Newport, Champlin Mason’s addition partakes of elements long established in European picture galleries: a cavernous room of undifferentiated walls able to accommodate groups of paintings tightly hung, an unencumbered floor plan to facilitate visitor circulation, and the use of a central art work to anchor the space. With this in mind, one is inclined to see Isham’s intervention as nothing short of a disavowal of Champlin Mason’s picture gallery. Indeed, we are told as much when Isham describes it as a text-centered reference area in his ‘Condition and Future Development of the Redwood’ report to then-Library VicePresident Roderick Terry: “It is proposed to fit the great room… as a reference and delivery room. The genealogical collections, and others which need to be grouped where the shelves are accessible, are to be put in the alcoves formed at the corners…” This effacement of Rhode Island’s first art gallery can be attributed to the Redwood’s bifurcated history as an athenæum— as both a library devoted to books and a museum displaying art. As many still do today, Isham clearly viewed the Redwood as fundamentally a library; and he had exactly the right, receptive patron in the bibliophile Roderick Terry. Their seeming unconcern with the art gallery can partly be explained by the fact that, then as now, the Redwood’s activities remained dominated by the workaday demands of the library function, notably by the needs of members who were largely readers, and by the ever present spatial considerations of book storage. The Redwood’s nineteenth-century footprint was much smaller than it is now, without the added wings and vaults, and this while it continued—as we do today—to ingest by gift and purchase a huge number of books. From 1861 to 1875 the Redwood took in nearly 12,000 volumes, a quantity that forced some of the stacks into the Delivery Room.
In fact, the dual nature of the athenæum as library and museum demanded that Champlin Mason’s gallery be adapted to mixed uses from the outset. If the impetus in 1862 had been to erect “a gallery for works of art,” the Library’s needs in 1875 made the completed gallery ideal to provide “ample room… for pictures, statuary, and library purposes for many years to come.” One might have hoped a generation later, when Isham and Terry were in dialog about the now removed bookshelves, that they could have
Figure 3. Redwood Delivery Room, ca. 1880.
heeded the wisdom of the librarian Bliss, who, in a 1908 lecture, was remarkably clear-eyed about the art gallery despite being so invested in books. Bliss is the only historic source anywhere who underlines art as integral to the athenæum model: “From the early days of this institution the word ‘athenæum’ was not a mere rhetorical expression. The Library was intended to be the dwelling place of the divine Athena—the patron of science and art no less than of literature.” Tellingly, Bliss describes the history of the room’s use as a sequence of inversions and reversions: “It was originally used as a reading room, but it was found difficult to warm it adequately in winter, so it was turned into an exhibition room for the portraits and curiosities. This addition is now used as a Stack Room…”
What is most revealing from Bliss’s testimony isn’t just what we learn of the real world contingencies that drove the Delivery Room’s past adaptations. Rather, it is the parallel with our own need to adapt it today, albeit for different reasons. Our concerns are no longer about heat in winter, and much less about the space to store books. The matter instead turns first on the existential question of what we entail as a multidisciplinary athenæum designed to accommodate “art no less than literature.” If the public humanities are our stock-in-trade, and interdisciplinarity
our house philosophy, we need our physical plant to match that historic mandate, established when Redwood Directors appended athenæum to the Library’s name in 1833 and an art gallery to its original building in 1875. In short, we needed to effect this restoration if we are to fully assume our charge as an athenæum. What compelled the restoration in a second instance also qualifies as ‘existential’ but in the literal sense: The matter instead turns first the financial sustainability of the Redwood on the existential question as a culture hub and civic commons. This of what we entail as a multidisciplinary athenæum touches directly on the interrelated issues of visitor experience relative to community support, and of spatial flexibility in designed to accommodate connection with revenue-generating special “art no less than literature.” events. Both reduce to our need to earn a living beyond passively circulating the beggar’s cup. With respect to the former, the objective was always to reproduce the richly appointed décor of the historic Delivery Room shown in the single vintage photograph that has come down to us (Fig. 3). The old world look of art works, statuary, and vitrines interspersed within period furnishings in a soaring space is our calling card: a setting redolent of erudition and discovery that enchants old and young alike and makes the Redwood a refuge for locals and an obligatory stop for any informed tourist. Here is a new visitor marveling soon after the opening in 1875: “We enter
Figure 4. Reading area, Rovensky Delivery Room, 2021.
at once and find ourselves in a superb hall… with an arched ceiling rising up to a skylight…of ground glass [that] affords a mellow and most agreeable light… [despite pending finishes] the changes are about so perfected that one can be comfortable there even now, and when it is all completed may luxuriate.” Our own changes might be said to be a return to the future, for the past configuration of offending bookshelves and no seating has now given way to an open gallery, delimited by encased vitrines on the perimeter, that facilitates the viewing of the paintings and which features two seating areas where one can read and contemplate shielded by strategically positioned bookshelves. (Figs. 1 and 4)
The placement of the latter satisfies important considerations regarding visitor accommodations, notably by providing cover for those seeking a minimum of privacy while still wanting a view onto the activities at the Library. In that sense, they surpass what some might lament in the removal of the 1914 bookshelves— even if they were very rarely used—that is, the two nooks in the room’s west quadrants. Reduced in size so as not to obstruct the daylight from the windows, the shelves duplicate the molding of those removed and make use of salvaged fluting to provide regular patrons a sense of familiarity and permanence. But more important is that they are entirely mobile, as their construction features a system of hidden casters that enables their movement or removal to accommodate special events, whether a wedding or a lecture (Fig. 5). Indeed, besides historical accuracy, the specific aim of the restoration was to yield complete flexibility: everything—including the front desk, itself on hidden casters—can be tucked out of sight in a few hours’ time. For example, with our added ability to move the Reading Room tables, the Redwood can now host a dinner for
250 people in our historic interior rather than outside in a rented tent costing a fortune. Likewise, with the space cleared the Rovensky Delivery room can host a major speaker with upwards of 175 in attendance, all seated in comfort in our new folding chairs and benefitting from our recently-installed top-shelf sound system generously paid for by the Champlin Foundation. .........In conclusion, the resulting restoration qualifies as one of those rare, Figure 5. Casters of mobile bookshelves. happy instances where historical rigor in the return to ‘what was’ accords exactly with what is needed in the present. Generally speaking the inverse is more often the case: the marring of historic spaces is often due to ill-advised enlargements of their usually restrictive dimensions. The marvel here was that the original plan was an enlargement in itself, aimed by design to satisfy the needs of art lovers, and eventually of readers as well as visitors. However, after 1914, when Isham’s shelved projections were implanted, what had been furnished and used since its erection as a space of both art display and study had become neither a suitable gallery where to view nor an inviting place where to read. Members who today regularly use the Library can verify that until this new reconfiguration the Rovensky Delivery Room had by and large been reduced to a flatly transactional site where to return or check out books to take to the Reading Room or directly home. We have now returned to the past, which has made us ready for the future. Sources: Champlin Mason, George Annals of the Redwood Library, (1891), pp. 224 ff. King, David, An Historical Sketch of the Redwood Library and Athenæum, (1876), 11. Bliss, Richard, The Newport Libraries, (1908), pp. 35-36. Benedict Leca, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Redwood Library & Athenæum.
