In Bryant Park there is a place where you can take free books, newspapers and magazines, sit under the yellow umbrellas and return them before leaving. It is the Reading Room, on the north side of the park, near the 42nd street: it exists in different forms since 1935, when it was opened during the Great Depression as a public service for those who could not afford to buy books and newspapers. Closed in the following years, it was restored in 2003 and today remains open every day from April to September, from 11 to 19.
September is the last month of the season and the program of 2026 concentrates in just under three weeks meetings with writers and poets, history lessons, silent reading hours and even a cruciverba tournament. All appointments are free and are held outdoors, with any changes communicated by Bryant Park in case of bad weather.
The first is Tuesday 1st September, from 18 to 19:15, and is dedicated to the relationship between poetry, illness and care. It’s Danielle Ofri and Thomas Dooley. Ofri is a doctor of Bellevue Hospital and teaches medicine at NYU, but for many years he also writes a relationship between doctors and patients and is among the founders of the Bellevue Literary Review, a literary magazine born in the hospital and dedicated to health, disease and body issues.
The next day the program changes completely topic. Wednesday, September 2nd, at 19, journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff will talk about The Only Plane in the Sky, his oral history of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The meeting arrives nine days before the 25th anniversary of the attacks and a few days after the release of a new expanded edition of the book. Graff built the story by putting together testimonies of almost five hundred people: survivors, rescuers, government officials, victims’ family and people who were at the airports, Pentagon and Twin Towers that day. The result is a story almost entirely entrusted to the voices of those who lived those hours.
On Tuesday, September 8th the poem returns, with an evening curated together with Sibling Rivalry Press, an independent publishing house particularly active in the publication of LGBTQ+ authors. From 18 will read Cai Sherley, Charlie Lou Evans, JC Andrews, Kaitlin Hsu and Toni Garcia-Butler; lead will be Bryan Borland, founder of the publishing house, and poet and essayist Kay Ulanday Barrett. The works of the authors address above all queer and trans identity, belonging, memory and community, with very different experiences from each other for origin and language.
One of the most important meetings in New York is Wednesday 9 September. David Conrad-Pérez will present Fire in the Heart of the City, a book published in September by NYU Press and dedicated to the fire of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory of 1911, in which 146 workers died, largely young immigrant women. The fire is generally remembered for the consequences he had on labor legislation and safety in factories. Conrad-Pérez reconstructs another consequence: the clash between the unions and the activists of the Lower East Side, represented among others by Rose Schneiderman, and the economic elite of the city, who tried to take control of aid to victims and their families. The book argues that that comparison contributed to the development of the modern American system of organized charity. The meeting begins at 7 pm.
On Tuesday, September 15, there will be two quite different ways of being among the books. From 15 to 17 there is the last seasonal session of Quiet Reading, an experiment introduced this year: for the first hour each law on its own, while the second is left to the conversation between the participants. At 18, the last event of the summer poetics will begin, with Chelsea Whitton, Dilruba Ahmed and Sahar Muradi. In the general program of the season Matt Yaeger also appears, while the updated event tab on Bryant Park website lists only the other three authors.
On September 19 the Reading Room will be occupied by people who with words have a somewhat more competitive relationship. From 10:30 to 14:30 will take place the eighth Bryant Park Crossword Tournament, with three original puzzles prepared by Mike Shenk, puzzle editor of the Wall Street Journal. You can participate individually or in pairs; the score takes into account both the correctness of the answers and the time used and the best competitors access a final. Participation is free, but registration is required.
The last appointment is Sunday, September 20 and is aimed at high school students and young adults. Bryant Park and Writopia Lab organise a free essay writing workshop, designed for both school and American university applications. We will talk about structure of arguments, style and construction of a personal voice. On the official website the time indicated is from 12 to 13:30, half an hour more than the 13 reported in some presentations of the program.
The Reading Room season ends with these meetings: after September books, newspapers and magazines are withdrawn until the next spring. It is one of the easiest activities of Bryant Park and also one of the oldest: read something free in the middle of Midtown, in the same place where you were doing during the Great Depression.
L’articolo In September Bryant Park becomes a large outdoor reading room proviene da IlNewyorkese.
