EP 7.2

Before it was known as the “Center for Fiction” and moved to 15 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, the New York Mercantile Library “functioned as a cultural center” located in the freshly rezoned Astor Place Opera House from 1854 until 1891 when they demolished the building and replaced it with and eleven story high rise. A pretty nice looking building in fact, great colors, fancy windows and a particularly hard to design parallelogram floor plan. The building was so nice in fact, some important fellow decided to place in front of it, a Black Cube of Saturn [footage of black cube on Saturn]. This library deserves a dedicated rabbit hole in itself, in which we will eventually explore, but for today I want to stay focused on what Brace was doing between the time of the Astor Place Riot, and his activities leading up to the incorporation of the Children’s Aid Society, finding a home in the Bible House for a short time waiting for construction to be finished, and it would then immediately move into the second story of the New York Mercantile library with many other “benevolent” societies.