Final Thoughts on the Athenaeum

Please note that this is a student project, and represents the student's impressions of his visit.
This project should not be considered an authenticated source on the history of the Providence Athenaeum.

To find out more about the Providence Athenaeum, please visit the library's webpage, providenceathenaeum.org.

So after researching and visiting the Athenaeum, I was struck with an interesting notion. As Victor Hugo argued, the book would become the main mean of human expression and record, killing architecture as the predominate art form. Is this really the case with the Athenaeum though? Does the Athenaeum derive its identity from what is written about it? Well, considering that I actually found out about the Athenaeum from a friend and not a book, it would seem that no, not all of the Athenaeums identity comes from the written word. And what about its memory? First, lets consider the collection itself as a source of human memory. There are very few note-worthy books in the collection that make the Athenaeum stand out from any other library. Those that do, however, derive their importance not by what they say, but by the fact that they were written by famous authors of the time, some of who actually wrote some of their work within the Athenaeum itself. And then there are the books and websites on the Athenaeum itself. Having read them, I came to understand the history of the Athenaeum better, but they did very little to aid my understanding of the libraries importance in the community. It wasn’t until I walked inside the building and witnessed the age of the building, the amount of books and which books, the paintings and artifacts from the past, that I began to see how the library works as a memory of the past on some level. I needed to be within the building to understand truly what the books were saying.

At the same time, however, the building doesn’t really depict or describe the actually history of the building. Just from the space and building itself I wouldn’t be able to tell you when the library was founded, just that the particular building was older than most. I wouldn’t be able to tell you that Edgar Allen Poe once worked in the building, or that it was the fourth oldest library in America, just that it was a nice, small library that looked like an inviting place to work. The façade of the building wouldn’t even be able to elicit anything near a concrete memory from me. So, it seems that the architecture of the building really can’t form the memory of the building as well. To me, it seems that the Athenaeum preserves the memory of a New England long ago by the interplay between the written word and the built space. One is not coherent with out the other.

What’s struck me as odd about the Providence Athenaeum is that the current Athenaeum doesn’t have any of the original books from the collection and is not in the same location as the old Athenaeum. There is very little that the present Athenaeum has in common with the past Athenaeum, so how does the Athenaeum work as a place of memories of Rhode Island past? While researching and visiting the library, I constantly pictured most of the actions taking place in the current building or at least at the same site. When I learned that Brown students were allowed to use the library in the late 1700’s, I completely forgot that the library was still at that point was not a block away on Benefit Street. Not only was the building different, but also because all the original books were burned in a fire early on, even the library collection is completely different. And yet, without any real trace to the original Athenaeum, its almost impossible to not see the current building as the site to remember everything about the library. But how does it work as being a site of memory?

In some sense, I’ve come to learn that the Athenaeum is a memorial, not just to the library itself, but many aspects of Americana. We see stories involving great American writers and famous American outlaws, references to great American styles depicting a since of power through democracy, as well as a portrait of our first leader. The library dates back to before the Revolutionary War and seems to have collected various aspects of our culture as it has aged, and with all this, the Athenaeum has created a site where we may go and remember our past. Knowing that the building is old, and what happened in the building, when it happened, all this knowledge added with the actual experience of this almost vivid actualization of the idea of an old American library provides a realization of our past. One visits the library, and knowing its history and exploring its selves, one is reminded of a large degree of carious aspects of American and Rhode Island History.

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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology